STEVIE Lyle was left to reflect on a haunting final period as the Swindon Wildcats were thumped 6-1 on their trip to Peterborough Phantoms tonight.

Lyle’s men had gone toe-to-toe with the reigning English Premier League play-off champions over the first three-quarters of an hour at Planet Ice, with Peterborough holding a slender 2-1 advantage.

However, three Phantoms goals in four minutes left the Cats spooked and they ended up getting hit for six by the time the final buzzer sounded.

“This is sounding like a broken record now, the first two periods we played how we wanted to play and then for some reason we hit an off switch,” said player/coach Lyle.

“They were going to come at us after that and that’s what happens if you are not focused for the full 60 minutes. That’s the way the league is this year, you’re going to get caught out.

“You have to play 20 minutes at a time. Unfortunately tonight we played the first 40 and the last 20 I think we thought the game was over.

“We can’t be taking periods off because we are not going to do anything this season with that.

“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, unfortunately. Somehow I have got to find a way of making that horse drink.

“You can always take one or two positives out of it but unfortunately it’s happening every weekend now.

“We need to start having four-point weekends because otherwise before we know it we are going to be playing catch-up a bit from Christmas onwards.”

Peterborough’s Will Weldon and Cats import Sami Ryhanen traded strikes in the first period, while Milan Baranyk got the only goal of the second as the hosts held a narrow lead.

However, that was as close as Swindon got and they fell apart in the final period as Ales Padelek, Baranyk and Darius Pliskauskas all netted in the space of four minutes before Edgars Bebris completed the rout.

Lyle dropped himself to the bench for the second game in a row as youngster Jordan Hedley went between the pipes but the Cats boss said he has not taken his place as number one netminder.

“Jordan played tonight and it wasn’t his fault. We just softened up at the end and we can’t have that,” said Lyle.

“He has been playing well since he came in and he has won the games he has played in so I wanted to keep that going but unfortunately it didn’t work out.

“He’s a good positive kid and the thing about him coming here was to give him game time to improve because he is going to be the future.”

The Cats are close to completing the capture of a new import following the shock departure of Miroslav Zalesak for personal reasons last week and Lyle expects that to be confirmed in the coming days.

“We will have a new coming import in next week who will add a lot to our team. I think either on Monday or Tuesday we will announce it,” said Lyle.

“There are a couple of guys who I had a choice from. Miroslav has a better resume but this guy is younger and hungrier and I think that’s what we need.”