THE Bespoke Guardians Swindon Wildcats slipped to consecutive defeats at the weekend - going down by an aggregate score of 15-9 against Leeds Knights and Peterborough Phantoms.

On Saturday, a disastrous first period left Swindon with too much work to do against Leeds Knights and the Wiltshire side ended up falling to a 10-5 defeat on home ice.

In the second outing of the weekend, Aaron Nell's men slipped to a narrow 5-4 defeat away in Cambridgeshire.

At the Link Centre on Saturday, two goals from Grant Cooper were added to by Cole Shudra and Matt Haywood as the league leaders raced into a 5-0 lead early on.

Tomasz Malasinski replied with a back-handed finish past Sam Gospel before the first buzzer sounded though.

Although Kieran Brown made it 6-1 on a Knights powerplay, Nell and Stevie Whitfield reduced Swindon's deficit to three goals prior to the end of the second period.

With faint hopes of a Cats comeback still in the air, Zach Brooks banged home a third-period hat-trick to take the game away from Swindon before Cooper added a third of his own to help Leeds reach double figures. Colby Tower and Sam Bullas also netted for Swindon on a tough night for the Wildcats.

Speaking to his in-house media team post-match, Nell insisted he could only be proud of his team's efforts.

The player-coach said: "Under no circumstances do I say we deserved to win, but we carried the play along for a lot of that game. We just fell apart for four minutes.

"We knew Leeds, once they get one they quite often get two. It was 1-0 at 13 minutes in, any other goalie in the league, we would have been up by two or three goals.

"I'm proud of my team, I don't really care what anyone else thinks."

"What are they now? 14-0-1. In the last two periods, we out-shot them 41-15 - I'm proud of them. I'd prefer that to happen rather than for us to just lose 3-2, it to be tight, and watch us sit back. I'm really proud of my team."

In Sunday's contest with Peterborough, the Phantoms were up 4-0 until midway through the second period after a goal from Lukas Sladkovsky either side of strikes from Jasper Foster and Duncan Speirs.

Malasinski and Tower halved the Wildcats' deficit before the second buzzer, only for Speirs to grab his second of the night early in the third.

The Swindon pair of Malasinski and Tower repeated their goal-scoring exploits in the dying embers, but it was too little, too late for the Cats to rescue any kind of reward.