News Report

Coaches thoughts.....

Coach Cliff gives his thoughts on the Solent game

• admin
• 02 October 2024

Hi Chieftains Fans,

I hope you are all having a good week and getting ready for a nice little run of home games through October, it has been a bit of a strange start to the season with mostly away games, but now we don’t have to go back out on the road for a while, and we will be looking to make our home advantage count over the next month.

Last weekend was a frustrating one, going into Solent we always know we will have to play differently to pretty much any other game in any other rink, it presents its own challenges with the dimensions of the pad, the quality of the ice and the general facilities, but there’s no point moaning about it, it’s the same for every team who goes there, and we will have to go there again later in the season.

Fundamentally we weren’t ready to go when the game started, that is on me and it is on the players, it has been 2 away games in 2 weeks where we haven’t been ready from the first drop of the puck, the first time we got away with it, and this time we paid the price for it. We rallied in the third period and nearly escaped but the late goal killed the game off, if we had started on time we wouldn’t have been in that position so as much as it is easy to say we lost the game in the final minute, we actually lost it in the first 20.  

This week we will look at the potential reasons behind our slow starts and get to work on making sure that’s the end of it.  

Losing a game early on in the season isn’t ideal, but it is also a great reminder that we must be on our game for 60 minutes every night.

This weekend we welcome Swindon who are new to the league, we know some of their players from other clubs in previous seasons but it is a new challenge for us and one we are very much looking forward to.

Looking forward to seeing you at the rink over the next few weeks,

Cliff.