WE suffered two tough losses in our pre-season games last weekend but I am confident it will be a different story when we play our first Moralee Conference game against Billingham Stars this weekend.

We were playing Sheffield Steeldogs who are a league above us and we lost 10-0 and 11-2 in the two matches.

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But it was a good learning curve for the players. We could have played against some lower league teams but we wanted to test ourselves and I think the games had that purpose.

We had a lot of young players playing and they will have learnt a lot from the experience.

In the second game we were in the game for 40 minutes and were only losing 5-2 but they blew us away in the last 20 minutes.

We kept going and didn’t give up and the games helped us get match minutes in ahead of the new season.

I said to the lads that it was about what we did as much as the scoreline and I was pleased with how we performed.

I was also pleased with the crowd.

We had a lot of fans watching us in the Sunday game and they supported us as much in the last minute as they did the first despite the scoreline.

Hopefully we can get another good crowd in this weekend for the first game of the season, it makes a real difference.

They are a really intelligent hockey crowd in Blackburn and they know that we are going through a transitional phase at the moment and might not be taking teams apart like we used to.

Having said that, we are going out to get two points against Billingham.

It is the first game of the season and we want to get off to a good start. We are playing one of our main rivals and we want to set down a marker.

I don’t think Billingham have won a game in Blackburn for three seasons and we want to extend that run. They beat us in the cup last season and that didn’t sit too well with me as they are one of my former clubs so hopefully we can start well on Sunday, get the right result, and get the season off to a good start.

I am confident that we will.