A NEED for speed – it’s a phrase that would sum up Blackburn Hawks star Jordan Bannon pretty well.

Not content with careering 30mph or more on the ice week to week, the 21-year-old shifts through the gears when he trades blades for wheels.

As well as pushing for title honours with Hawks – which could be achieved for the first time in the club’s history this weekend if results go their way tomorrow night – Bannon is going for personal glory in the Supermoto British Championships.

“I like speed,” he said.

“It’s nothing to do with ice hockey being dangerous. I don’t really get a thrill out of being smacked in the face with a puck.

“With bikes you get the thrill from the danger and the speed of it.”

Even off the ice or off the track Bannon is never still.

“I like to be doing something all the time,” he said. “The only time I sit down to watch television is when Broadchurch is on. But even in that there’s too much time in the courtroom. I want to know what’s going on ‘out in the field’. And I still think the guy in the dock did it.”

Bannon made an exception to his lack of television-time rule when his hero was on ITV’s “I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!” - Blackburn-born Carl Fogarty. He even cast a vote for the first time in the final to make sure the former World Superbike Champion was crowned ‘King of the Jungle’.

Lancashire Telegraph:

But it was ice hockey that the Liverpool-born forward was hooked on first, after being introduced to his local rink for his eighth birthday, when he went skating with his friends.

He had an aptitude and returned regularly with his parents, and was soon approached to join the Under 11s ice hockey team.

Trips to Manchester Storm fuelled his love of the game, and he was proud to later play for Manchester Phoenix.

“I went through a stage before I left school of wanting to move to Canada to play. I suppose that was my way of thinking I could play at the top level,” said Bannon, who has played for Manchester Phoenix, then English Premier League sides Telford Tigers and Deeside Dragons either side of two spells with Blackburn Hawks.

“When I reached 16 I decided I wanted to stay at home. A lot of my mates’ parents paid ridiculous money for them to go to college in Canada and they haven’t played at the level that I have.

“Things worked out well for me, although I knew the game was never going to make me a millionaire. I couldn’t have made a career out of it.”

Instead he started an apprenticeship at Jaguar Land Rover in Halewood, Knowsley, where he is in the last of a four-year mechanical electronic engineer apprenticeship, maintaining the equipment used in vehicle manufacturing.

“The first time I signed for Hawks was about two weeks after I got the job and played there for a year before leaving to join Telford in the EPL,” said Bannon, a former Great Britain Under 20 squad member.

From there his career moved closer to home, with Deeside, to help restore his passion for the game.

The travelling for training and games was wearing him down; getting home to Merseyside no earlier than 2am after training on Thursdays then up for work at 6am. At the end of that shift it would be straight back down the A5 in preparation for the weekend’s games, staying in the same house as the club’s import players.

“We’d be away on the Saturday, sometimes as far away as Guildford, so it could be 2am when we got back, then we’d play a home game on the Sunday, so it could be midnight-1am by the time I got home and it was back to work on the Monday.

“It became a chore,” he said. “I was glad I had the opportunity, but it was too much. The EPL is a big commitment and I’ve got other interests.”

Which brings us back to the bikes.

As well as aiming to help Hawks win their first title, Bannon is in training for the Supermoto season. He will spend today in Oswestry, practicing on one of the circuits, before setting off for East Lancashire in time for Hawks’ showdown with Sheffield Spartans at Blackburn Ice Arena (face-off 5.45pm).

The Liverpudlian has only completed one full year of competitions, but he is already a British champion.

As he prepares to progress to the highest level – the Elite Championships – he is hoping it wasn’t a case of beginner’s luck.

“I’d like to finish in the top 10 this year, then after that who knows,” said Bannon, who unlike most of his rivals does not have a sponsor.

“I’ve had bikes since I was six but it was just for fun. I started taking ice hockey pretty seriously when I was 10 so I stopped riding.

“When I was 16/17 I got a bike on the road, then when I started earning enough money I looked into racing. Supermoto’s a lot slower than road racing because it’s 75 per cent tarmac and 25 per cent dirt track – there are more obstacles – but you can still get up to 130mph on some tracks.

“I don’t know how fast you travel in ice hockey, but if Usain Bolt can run 27mph perhaps you could get up to 30mph. If two players travelling at that speed hit each other, that’s a 60mph impact.”

It’s little wonder, given the risks, that Bannon has dislocated both shoulders through incidents with both bike and blades, most recently while riding in January 2014.

“I didn’t play for the rest of the year, so when I came back to Blackburn I was pretty rusty,” he explained. “But it was like coming home. It’s the best squad I’ve been involved in.”

n Anyone interested in sponsoring Bannon’s Supermoto season should contact jordan-b-11@hotmail.co.uk