THE Bespoke Guardians Swindon Wildcats head coach Aaron Nell spoke of his relief at finally picking up a four-point weekend ahead of the final two weekends of the season.

Swindon edged past Telford Tigers on Saturday to deny them the chance of lifting the trophy at the Link Centre before cruising to a 5-3 win over the Bees 24 hours later.

Reflecting on just the team’s second maximum of 2022, Nell said there was plenty of emotion after removing the proverbial monkey from their back.

He said: “I think it was more relief last weekend because we hadn’t done that in a while.

“Saturday was a really big game for us because Telford could have won the league in our rink, and we didn’t want that to happen.

“But we picked up a huge win on Saturday, and Sunday proved we could do it two nights in a row – I was really happy with both performances.”

The Wildcats can take a huge step towards securing second this weekend should they see off both Basingstoke Bison (Friday night) and The Raiders (Saturday).

Nell said: “We want to finish as high up the table as we possibly can, and we’ve played four good games in a row now.

“There’s been a big difference from our previous four games prior, and we want to keep that going.

“It is about position at this point, but more importantly it’s about going into play-offs in good form and confident.”

With the league title gone for this year, Swindon can still take the season-ending NIHL National Division play-off title back to Wiltshire.

While wins are the ultimate goal, Nell wants his team to focus on playing well for the time being as confidence in their performances are more likely to equal positive results.

He said: “The reality is, if you’re performing well then the results come more often than not.

“I would probably say performances are more important at the moment, and I think it’s important for us to be able to turn those good performances into good results.

“You saw that over the past couple of weeks. We played well against Peterborough two Sundays ago and lost in overtime, whereas we had a slightly better performance the next Saturday and we ended up winning.

“We want to finish second, but I think the performances are more important right now.”