ADAM Harding has urged his Swindon Wildcats team-mates to defy the odds and pick up four points on the road this weekend.

The Cats have just three English Premier League fixtures remaining before the annual fortnight-long pre-Christmas hiatus, the first two of which are away from home.

Aaron Nell’s men travel to Milton Keynes Lightning on Saturday before making the trip to Peterborough Phantoms 24 hours later.

The task facing the Cats is not for the faint-hearted as both their weekend opponents are within a point of Basingstoke Bison at the top of the table.

However, a hefty clutch of points before the break will boost the Cats’ chances of success in 2015-16 as they look to improve on their current standing of fifth.

“We are in a good spot now so these games leading up to Christmas are huge,” said 22-year-old Harding.

“Then we have a break and some teams die off after the break and some teams thrive from it.

“If we’d have won on Sunday night at Hull I think we would have overtaken Guildford, or tied them, something like that.

“These points right now are crucial leading into Christmas. We need to take two points out of these away games, especially as we lost on Sunday.”

Although the Cats were only beaten in overtime at Hull – meaning they still took home a point – that did not make the loss any easier to swallow.

It meant they finished with three points from the weekend, having beaten reigning league champions Telford Tigers at the Link Centre the previous day.

The victory was just a third in 20 games for the Pirates since they joined the league at the start of the campaign and forward Harding says the Cats cannot afford to lose games like that if they are to be genuine challengers this season.

“It doesn’t feel like we got a point, it just feels like a loss against a team like that,” said Harding.

“Telford are the best team in the league. I know they are in sixth spot or whatever, but they are the best team in the league. We can’t go from beating them to losing at Hull.

“We received a lot of penalties on Sunday and we can’t be doing that, we should be going there and beating them.

“They do work hard and they do skate hard. They are not the greatest team but they do come hard at you every night.

“I don’t think we respected them enough and I don’t think we played to our full potential.

“Against Telford we played an unbelievable game and then on Sunday we went to Hull and we should be beating them.”