Individual News
25th of September 2008
Who would have predicted the events of last weekend? Saturday, a dreadful home game and a heavy loss against Cardiff and on Sunday a well-deserved Cup win away , without Brad Cruikshank, Curtiss Patrick and Eric Braff.
The players are well aware of how fans felt on both occasions. Believe me, the players felt Saturday as deeply as the most passionate fan. They're professional sportsmen who take pride in how they perform. We knew it was all going horribly wrong and that we would just have to battle it out. Confidence oozed away and frustration built up. The longer the game went on, the worse it became.
I had felt in the midweek game against Belfast that we had not played with the same hunger we had shown in previous games. Perhaps wrongly, with Braff injured, I felt that on Saturday I should play and try to restore some of that energy. Steve Thornton had written in his Giants column during the week about how hard he found it as a player-coach, neither fully involved in the action nor able to observe the game critically. I think you can get away with it in a lower league, but not in the Elite.
But on Sunday I had no choice. With a short bench, we decided to play a simpler system with more emphasis on defence. And it worked. Good decisions were being made, communication improved and we started to play as a team. Confidence flowed again and Kevin Reiter's man of the match was more than well-deserved.
I'd had no hesitation asking Mark Richardson to take over as Captain on the night. Talking after the game, we both remarked on how sometimes players in a team that's in a really difficult situation can sometimes find that it helps them to find self-belief quite quickly.
Saturday may have felt like the end of the world, but Sunday promises a brighter season ahead. We know how much we'll benefit from time to bring our fitness levels up and to bed down the technical side of our game.
You can tell a lot about a team when it is winning. You can tell a lot more about the character of your team by the way it responds after a heavy defeat. Right now, we're ready to go and looking forward to the weekend.
The players are well aware of how fans felt on both occasions. Believe me, the players felt Saturday as deeply as the most passionate fan. They're professional sportsmen who take pride in how they perform. We knew it was all going horribly wrong and that we would just have to battle it out. Confidence oozed away and frustration built up. The longer the game went on, the worse it became.
I had felt in the midweek game against Belfast that we had not played with the same hunger we had shown in previous games. Perhaps wrongly, with Braff injured, I felt that on Saturday I should play and try to restore some of that energy. Steve Thornton had written in his Giants column during the week about how hard he found it as a player-coach, neither fully involved in the action nor able to observe the game critically. I think you can get away with it in a lower league, but not in the Elite.
But on Sunday I had no choice. With a short bench, we decided to play a simpler system with more emphasis on defence. And it worked. Good decisions were being made, communication improved and we started to play as a team. Confidence flowed again and Kevin Reiter's man of the match was more than well-deserved.
I'd had no hesitation asking Mark Richardson to take over as Captain on the night. Talking after the game, we both remarked on how sometimes players in a team that's in a really difficult situation can sometimes find that it helps them to find self-belief quite quickly.
Saturday may have felt like the end of the world, but Sunday promises a brighter season ahead. We know how much we'll benefit from time to bring our fitness levels up and to bed down the technical side of our game.
You can tell a lot about a team when it is winning. You can tell a lot more about the character of your team by the way it responds after a heavy defeat. Right now, we're ready to go and looking forward to the weekend.