JARED Owen has warned his Blackburn Hawks side ‘we can’t afford any more mistakes’ after suffering a shock defeat to Sheffield Spartans on Sunday.

The 7-4 loss placed a huge dent in their English National Ice Hockey League North One league hopes and even left them facing a battle to secure an end of season play-off position.

The Hawks coach admits his side ‘got out of jail free’ the previous day, in a 4-3 home win over Whitley, but was left ruing a similarly below par display as Sutton closed up on their third place spot.

Owen said: “That was a really bad two points to drop. We were sloppy all weekend and in the end got what we deserved. We know many more weekends more like that and we can forget what we want to achieve this season.

“Sutton drew at Billingham at the weekend and are closing on us, I think they will go third if they win their game in hand.

“We don’t want to be looking over our shoulders, we want teams to be worried about us.

“We don’t just want to sneak into the play-off positions either, we want to get a good league position and weekends like the one we have just had certainly don’t help.

“After getting away with it on Saturday, I hoped we would have learned our lesson for the next day. We didn’t and got punished.

“We need to be on it consistently from now on.”

Dan Mackriel’s late winner spared Hawks’ blushes at the Arena on Saturday as Owen’s men came from 2-0 down to salvage a 4-3 victory.

Hawks were behind within six seconds on Saturday evening and were trailing 2-0 by the end of the first period.

Goals from Owen and Matt Viney brought the hosts level, before Petr Jagr scored his first for the club to put Hawks ahead. Whitley levelled, but Mackriel came to the rescue.

“We came out very flat,” said Owen.

“After a terrible start though we chipped away at them and managed to get our noses in front, before losing that again through a silly mistake.

“Ultimately we won but that was a warning to us that we just didn’t take. We were lucky to win the match on Saturday no doubt about it and the lads knew it as well.”

Hawks started even worse the following day as, by the end of the first period, they were staring at a 3-0 deficit.

Goals from Jagr, Owen, Aaron Davies and Ivo Dimitrijevs pulled the visitors back into the game, with the score 4-4 going into the last period.

An error allowed Sheffield to take the lead again early in the period and, it was downhill from there, as Hawks ended up on the wrong end of a 7-4 defeat.

“Going into the last period, it looked as though there was only one team who was going to win after the way we had come back” said Owen. “They scored with their first shift and that was that really.

“I don’t know what was wrong with us. We were sloppy and flat and made far too many mistakes. There are no excuses, the defeat was completely our own fault.

“We have to cut out the errors and we have to be more consistent.”