AFTER Lady Luck deserted his side in Sheffield, Swindon Wildcats head coach Stevie Lyle will be quick to remind his troops of the positives from their performance in South Yorkshire.

The Wildcats endured an evening of frustration as they were beaten 3-1 by the Sheffield Steeldogs, going more than two full periods without finding the net at IceSheffield as they slipped to their second defeat of the season.

The puck simply didn’t bounce Swindon’s way in the Steeldogs zone whilst Lyle’s opposite number between the pipes – Dalibor Sedlar – enjoyed an effective night in the Sheffield goal but the Wildcats boss insists it isn’t all doom and gloom.

Asked what went wrong for his visitors, Lyle said: “Not much, really. I thought we played a pretty good, solid game – they just scored on three of our breakdowns.

“Their goalie played very well tonight – he’s not normally like that – but unfortunately, that’s going to happen.

“You’re not going to win every game but we kept pushing forward and unfortunately we just couldn’t get that extra goal to try and push on.

“You’re going to get nights like that but first of all, it’s how you bounce back and secondly, it’s keeping guys positive because there were a lot of positive things out there tonight..

“There are still a lot of things to work on but it’s still early on in the season and there’s no trophies up for grabs right now.

“Unfortunately, it’s a long trip home but we’ve only got ourselves to blame because we couldn’t find the back of the net tonight.

“That’s going to happen and Telford probably felt the same last weekend. It’s one of those things and I think every team is going to pretty much beat every team this year.

“We just have to make sure that we’re ready for Manchester now.

“We’ll watch the video, try and cancel out a couple of errors and hopefully get two wins next weekend.”

The Wildcats go looking to bounce back to winning ways when they host the Manchester Phoenix and travel to Guildford Flames next weekend.