THERE was a feeling of relief in the changing room after we beat Billingham Stars 9-4 in the cup on Sunday night.

We really needed that win. We’d lost seven games in a row before going to Billingham but we knew the result was coming, you could see things were clicking but we were losing concentration at times in games.

On Sunday we dominated the game and took our chances.

We’d actually played really well at home against Hull Pirates on Saturday, which gave us the belief.

A week ago we lost 10-3 to Hull so to only lose 3-1 this time was a clear sign of progress. On our rink we can beat any team, nobody likes coming to Blackburn where the ice isn’t great. We were in the game the whole way and you couldn’t fault the effort and we played really well.

We played with more speed than we have been doing, even when we didn’t have the puck. It’s dangerous when you don’t have it, that’s when you can lose games, so I think we focused not only on when we had it but when we were defending as well, we won our 50-50 battles and it was great to see.

We were up 5-2 going into the third period and I warned the boys that in the last few weeks we’d either been winning or in tight games and we’d end up losing through mistakes. I said ‘we’ve wanted to be in this position for a while, so let’s make it count’.

You could tell after the game what it had done for everyone, the squad was upbeat and it was exactly what we needed.

It’s going to be massive for confidence. If we take that into next weekend and win against Nottingham then that will be huge.

The last few games we’ve played have been in the cup, which in a way has been lucky for us because the results haven’t gone our way.

We’ve got the opportunity now to turn it around and pick things up again. We’ve got a run of league games now and we go into them with confidence.

I must give a special mention to Jack Murray, who played his first senior game for us at Billingham and did really well. He’s come up from the under-18s and I was really impressed with how he played, he showed a lot of maturity and for his age he was excellent.

It’s good to see young players coming through, he’ll play again next week at Nottingham.