THIS week, we have seen another club get hit by financial difficulties but, like Telford Tigers, I hope Manchester Phoenix can complete the season.

I’m not too surprised, they’ve been having trouble for a couple of years now and they made a big decision to leave their arena where they always played.

I know there are some politics going on there, it seems like they needed a new home to stay and they’ve been bouncing around different arenas outside of Manchester to survive.

I think it’s finally taken its toll but right now we aren’t sure if they’re 100 per cent going to pull out because we have a game scheduled with them on Saturday.

As a club we hope they continue and finish the season. The more teams there are in the league the better the league is for everyone. It hurts the rest of the clubs as well, we are all hoping someone comes in and rescues them so we have the same thing which happened in Telford.

It seems like there is a lot of movement going on, I heard about Guildford wanting to join the Elite League and that came as a surprise.

For years they have been saying it is better for them to be in the English Premier League, but then all of a sudden they’ve put in an application to be in the Elite League.

It will be interesting to see how the whole thing unfolds. If the two teams go up and one ceases operation, we are all of a sudden down to seven teams.

There are capable people running the EPL and I am sure they will figure out what is best for the league.

The home loss to Peterborough Phantoms hurt because we were on a little bit of a roll and we performed well in the game.

Losing Mark Smith and Matt Selby is a huge blow because every time we get somebody back, we lose two players so it’s been frustrating. We haven’t been full strength all year but we thought we were going to be for the home stretch - defensively, Mark has been the biggest part of our club.

Now we have to step up again, try and keep it positive and make sure we are ready for the last few months.