Hull Seahawks coach Matty Davies hurting over Milton Keynes Lightning National Cup Final loss - but vows to quickly move on

The Seahawks were well-beaten 5-1 in Buckinghamshire on Tuesday night, giving their rivals an aggregate 10-5 triumph having already edged the first leg in Hull.

Davies was left puzzled by his team’s below-par performance on such a big occasion – they remain the only team to win in Milton Keynes this season – but is refusing to dwell on it for too long with the NIHL National play-offs just around the corner.

Hull bring the curtain down on their regular season campaign with a Saturday night visit to Solway Sharks before hosting recently-crowned league champions Leeds Knights on Sunday.

The Yorkshire rivals meet again the following week in the opening round of group play-off games and Davies will be keen for his players to create some winning momentum going into those encounters with improved performances across two nights this weekend.

“We have to move on quickly, or this year will come and go pretty quick,” said Davies.

“We have to jump past the fact that we had a chance, we lost and that’s it – it’s over. We’ve got to find our momentum and some confidence quickly.

“We want to go to the Final Four Weekend in Coventry and we’ve got a chance if we do get there – but we’ve got to get there first and we’ve got some big games to play in order to do that.

“We need to remember what that feeling was like in Milton Keynes (on Tuesday night) and use it to drive us forward into the play-offs.”

First-period strikes from Ross Venus and Toms Rutkis put the Lightning in control going into the first intermission in front of a sellout crowd, the vast majority of who were sent even more delirious when Dillon Lawrence made it 3-0 in the 24th minute.

The night got worse for the visitors when Rutkis doubled his tally just after the halfway mark, the Latvian-born forward completing his hat-trick just over five minutes into the third period.

Finlay Ulrick fired in a power play goal for Hull at 56.09, but it was little more than a consolation for Davies and his players.

Reflecting on the game, Davies said a bad first shift seemed to set the tone for the rest of the night.

“I just don’t think we turned up, really,” he added. “Everything we spoke about before the game was about how, in that first 10 minutes, let’s just weather the storm. We knew they were going to come hard and put it on us as they always try to do in there.

“And the first shift was bad, we made an error, took the puck back in our end and took a bad penalty and it was just a bad start.

“Then it just rumbled on from there. We got back into the game a little bit and we had chances, but we just didn’t score when we needed to.

“The power play wasn’t good again and when you don’t score on power plays, you just invite pressure on yourself.”

Davies’ pain was made worse due to the vocal travelling support that made it all the way down from East Yorkshire hoping to see their team overturn the one-goal deficit created on home ice last week.

“It was great to see how many fans we had there and that was one of the most disappointing things that we didn’t put in a performance for them,” he said. “We never really laid a glove on them and made it a real game.”