Warriors make final

Tue 04, 2010 13:15

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Whitley Warriors will do battle with old rivals Nottingham Lions once again after winning 4-1 at Sheffield on Saturday night to book their place in the English National league Championship final.

Last time the two sides met the league title was at stake and it was Whitley who triumphed when Bryan Dunn netted the winning goal with just 90 seconds of the game remaining to give them a 4-3 victory at Hillheads; and Warriors coach Simon Leach expects the two legs of the final to be equally close.

“There has been nothing between the teams all season,” he said, “we lost by a single goal at their rink and have beaten them home and away by a similar score - with one match drawn – so I expect these two games to be exactly the same.”

As league champions, the Warriors are expected to have home advantage in the second leg, probably on April 25, but Leach will still be going to the Midlands looking for a victory.

“I want to bring a lead back to Hillheads for the second leg,” he said, “even in the game we lost at Nottingham we were three goals up early on, but I had a very small squad that night and we ran out of steam.

“But now we have a chance to add a second trophy this season and the whole squad is focussed on doing just that.”

As for the game in Sheffield on Saturday, Leach was full of praise for the ‘professional’ performance of his side.

“They (Sheffield) will probably have fancied their chances of going through after only losing 3-2 at Hillheads the previous weekend,” he said, “but we never really gave them the opportunity to get a foothold.

“We were good value for our 2-0 lead at the first break and even though we once again had to kill a lot of penalties - something I can never understand in play-off hockey – I can’t praise the team performance enough.”

Sheffield tried to make the most of their powerplay chances and did score their only goal with the man advantage, as they had done at Hillheads the previous weekend, but even when they broke through, netminder James Flavell was almost impossible to beat.

“Flav made saves on the powerplay especially that were crucial,” conceded Leach, “but he is a goalie that has hit his best form at exactly the right time of the season and has taken his game to another level in the play-offs.”

“Now we can look forward to an exciting finale to the season and I expecting two tough games between the best two sides in the league over the next couple of weekends,” the Whitley coach concluded.