SCOTT SPEARING says Bracknell Bees’ weekend performances were “not acceptable” after extending their disappointing run to 15 defeats in 17 matches.
Bees finally found some joy on Sunday, beating Milton Keynes Thunder on penalties at The Hive having lost 6-3 to London Raiders on Saturday.
The poor run leaves Bracknell well adrift of top spot in NIHL Division 1 South, down in fifth place with 12 regular season games to go until the play-offs.
And Spearing admits he was far from happy with what he saw from his team over the weekend.
“I’m really disappointed to be honest with the result from both days,” the Bees player-coach told The Wokingham Paper.
“We need to be doing a lot better as a team and we have a lot of depth on our team and a lot of experience and a lot of youth and Saturday’s performance, no shadow of a doubt, was not acceptable.
“I made that fully aware to the players that I don’t expect them to play as poor as they did.
“We have to be better, no doubt about that.
“Even on Sunday, we got the win but a narrow win against basically a less professional team that don’t train as much as us so shouldn’t be as fit as us, aren’t as skilled as us and just shouldn’t be competing with us to the level they did.
“I made it clear to the team that we we need to be better.”
Bees made a flying start to the campaign, winning 11 of their first 15 matches and sat comfortably in the top three of the table in early November and just two points off top spot.
But a slow start proved costly on Saturday as they were leapfrogged by London Raiders, slipping to fifth after the 6-3 loss, now 13 points behind the league leaders.
And Spearing said Bees struggled to bounce back from going 2-0 down at Raiders, accusing his side of not being up for the physical nature of the contest.
“I think the team that we’ve got this year, when we come out and we start well and we play well right off the first puck drop, we get a lot of confidence from it,” he said.
“Unfortunately we didn’t do that on the Saturday and we came out very flat and we didn’t look hungry for pucks and we didn’t look like we wanted to battle.
“To be honest, we looked like a load of football players and nobody looked like they wanted to get any physical contact, nobody wanted to make a hit and I made that clear that that’s what you have to do when you go into those small rinks.
“Those teams are not as skilled as us but what they do have is they’ll work hard for 60 minutes, every single second of every single shift and that’s how they compete because they have to out-work teams that are more skilled than them and I said that.
“We just didn’t match their effort and we just needed to be more switched on.”
But Spearing is now keen to put these disappointments behind him.
Bees’ next three matches are against the bottom three sides in the league, starting with Streatham at The Hive on Sunday (6pm).
And he remains confident Bracknell can still have a good season.
“It’s good to get these type of defeats out the system,” he said.
“Every time something happens like a little bump in the road, you have to build on it and learn from it and keep pushing forward.
“Remember it but don’t harp on about it, you don’t want to be thinking about it the whole time, you just want to keep it in the back of your mind and think when we came out flat, we didn’t play very well.
“But we want to step it up, we need to push on now, develop how we play together, who we’re playing with and start growing as a team.
“That will come and play-off hockey is up to everyone, but you just want to make sure you get that good roll into the play-offs and that starts from now.”
