The Northstars defeated the visiting Brisbane Lightning 9-1 at home in front of a capacity crowd on Saturday night, with a number of players ticking the box of career milestones in the game.

Northstars local goaltender Matthew Montgomery recorded his first AIHL career win, newest imports Alexander Yuill and Kyler Matthews both scored their first AIHL goals, and their second.

Returning forward Riley Klugerman recorded his first hat-trick of the season and Brisbane Lightning skater Luka Ouimette scored his first AIHL goal.

Newcastle’s fans lived up to their reputation, making noise and chanting for the Northstars from the first drop of the puck. With every goal for the home team the crowd got louder and louder.

Northstars Captain Liam Manwarring shared, “Our goal tonight was to minimise anything against and you get offence from doing that, and we did it very well.”

“Offence is going to come when you play defence first and that was our goal all night,” Manwarring continued, “from the first 20 to the last 20 we were successful with that.”

Assistant coach Dave Ferarri shared, “There was a lot of good stuff offensively. We had a consistent effort of getting the essentials right and getting the structure right. It really starts with our defence. Hawesy [Ethan Hawes], Alex [Yuill] Kyler [Matthews] and Drew [Robson] were all defending really well and playing the right way. From there everyone follows that.”

Lightning were unable to match the pace of the Northstars who got back to basics playing a strong and structured game.

“Coming to Newcastle is always hard.” Shared Lightning’s assistant captain Sacha Rapchuk, “ever since the exhibition season we’ve kind of had a war every game with Newcastle.”

“We came into this game with the mindset of war, but it didn’t go our way. We’ll be looking ahead to bounce back from this. We’ve got a few hard teams coming up but I think we can do well.”

Lightning General Manager Ivan Rapchuk shared, “I think there’s no doubt that Newcastle brought their game. They brought the heat both in their passing game and in the physicality of the game.”

“We need to be defensively better,” Rapchuk continued, “a number of times we got caught with guys coming in the back door for the goal, but it felt like on both sides it was quite disciplined as far as not ending up in the penalty box.”

Alexander Yuill got the scoring started and the home team on the board first, followed by a single goal each for Riley Klugerman and Kyler Matthews giving the Northstars a 3-0 lead over the Lightning going to the first break.

Yuill shared, “I think we did well in the d-zone, we got pucks broken up pretty easily and then we spent more time in the O zone to make our chances. We used our points and passed to the D which opened things up for us.”

Klugerman got the home fans on their feet again in the opening of the second period. Brisbane fought to keep the Northstars out of their zone but would to succumb to 3 more unanswered goals from Kyler Matthews, Daniel Berno and Francis Drolet.

Matthews shared, “The fans are loud, and it was a great game to be a part of. When we score first and the crowd gets into it, it gives us the momentum we need to keep going.”

Newcastle went to the second intermission leading the game 7-0.

The lightning had a lift and boost of momentum in the third period, however, it was short lived as Yuill secured his second goal of the night followed by Klugerman securing his hattrick goal.

“Kluges is very special.” Manwarring continued, “He’s very good at his craft and works very hard at it and that’s (the hattrick) well deserved.”

Lightning’s Luka Ouimette secured his first AIHL career goal, to give the Lightning their sole goal of the game.

Rapchuk reflected, “It was a fast clean game for the best portion of it and kudos to both teams for that. I thought they played hard but they played clean and I think the fans appreciate a game like that rather than a stop-start special teams game.”

The Northstars will rest up and return on Saturday 25^th May to welcome the Canberra Brave back to Hunter Ice Skating Stadium. Get your tickets from Northstars.thundertix.com