Newcastle had a split weekend in Melbourne, defeated 5-1 by the Mustangs on Saturday and taking a 4-1 victory over the Ice in overtime on Sunday.

The Northstars remain at the top of the Rurak Conference with a two-point gap between them and Canberra Brave.

Head Coach Kevin Noble shared, “I think for us going forward is that when we play our game with a level of pace and urgency and physicality, we’re a lot better off than trying to play a slow, methodical game that plays into the other team’s hands.”

“At this point in the season, some teams have a little more to play for in some games than others and for us we have everything to play for in the last three games of the season, it’s all in our hands and we can’t lose again if we want to win the trophy.”

The challenge against the two Melbourne teams exposed the Northstars to a bit of everything with powerplays, penalty kills, a fight and ejection, goals, saves, and overtime. Noble reflected on these moments and how this helps the team as it is only a few weeks from playoffs.

“You need individual efforts at this time of year, look at Saturday night’s game, it was a great fight by Berno, good timing with 11 minutes to go in the period and it’s good pushback and well calculated.”

“I love what Daniel brings to our group and the level of engagement he brings nightly. Not many imports around the league perform the same. We’re really fortunate to have him in our line-up.”

Noble acknowledged Saturday’s loss coming down to “individual mistakes.” Also, looking at the lead-up to the weekend in Melbourne, Noble stated, “Our powerplay leading into that game hadn’t been great – having limited looks. And the last four games leading into that one hadn’t been good, and it was about as bad as it’s looked in a long time against the Mustangs.”

“All in all, its just anything that could go wrong went wrong for us, and when you have those types of poor efforts and some untimely mistakes from your better guys, and an inconsistent game from our team in terms of momentum, losing special teams and the battles, then its not surprising that you lose a game.”

“I actually thought there were stretches where we looked really good, and we were the better team but unfortunately had a couple of untimely mistakes and that’s what happens.”

Coach Noble shares week in and week out how Newcastle will get back to work, after a weekend of hockey. This week is no exception, “as far as team stuff goes, we’ll go into playoff mode and review our systems and structure in detail so we’re not trying to cram that in at the last minute.”

“At the end of the day there’s five guys on the ice and it’s really a bunch of individual battles all over the ice and games played on the boards. At the end of the day as much as this is about the team, it comes down to individuals. The team that ups their individual compete wins a lot of the individual battles and will win the game regardless of a lot of the other components.”

In the fight to secure first place Noble shares, “We got two points but it wasn’t good enough. We still have the opportunity to finish first, and that is important to us because that’s like winning the Friday game, we don’t have to try and win three in a row.”

While Canberra Brave edges closer to that top spot, Noble shared, “we’ll see what type of pressure they put on our group, but at the end of the day it’s really up to us. It doesn’t matter what Canberra does now, it’s on us to do what we’re supposed to do and that’s the beauty of it.”

“Looking around the league, at anytime you control the fate and hold it in your hands, that’s a positive. When you flip the script and need help from other teams hoping on them to win or lose then you’re in a bad spot.”

“We’re fortunate enough that we did a lot of good work throughout the season and our guys put in effort early on to put ourselves in a position to be successful.”

“You want to control your own fate, and we’ve done that. We don’t need to look outside to anybody else. We’ve done our work, we’re in a good spot.”

Northstars will have a single game weekend this weekend, taking on the Central Coast Rhinos at Hunter Ice Skating Stadium on Sunday 28^th July.

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