BRAEHEAD CLAN’S head coach John Tripp admits that he is delighted that his team appear to have turned a corner and are finding the form that will allow them to rise up the EIHL.

The Glasgow team suffered defeat at the hands of Nottingham Panthers on Sunday but the day before, their victory over Coventry Blaze was their fifth in a row. This was hugely encouraging for Tripp, who had seen his men lose nine of their eleven games in October but the Canadian is confident that a corner has now most certainly been turned. “The weekend went well – I was happy with that,” he said. “It’s important to play well at home and we did that in both games. We had a good game against Nottingham but they are very strong and their experience overtook us. The guys are playing together as a team though and everybody is falling in line as they should be so that was good.”

Braehead’s run of defeats and their subsequent slide down the table were, admits Tripp, disheartening but he is hugely encouraged about the fact that his players did not just accept their fate and instead, worked hard to get out of their slump and the head coach believes they are in a better place as a result. “We’ve definitely learned a lot,” he said. “Failure is a big thing – it’s easy to fail but what is not so easy is to learn from it. But the guys responded from that run of losses and that’s a good thing to see. It shows their respect for the game - they could have just given up and continued getting the same kind of results, they absolutely didn’t.”

And while his team’s hockey may have improved in recent weeks, perhaps the most important thing is that their mindset has altered too. “I definitely feel like players are getting their confidence back,” said Tripp. “Confidence is such an important thing - and a place we really need to get our confidence back is in the power plays. You have to have a good power play and that’s something that comes with practice so we’ll keep working on that.”

While Tripp is encouraged by his team’s recent victories, he knows that they need to bring that level of performance to the table when they are playing the top-of-the-league teams, and that starts on Friday when they take on Sheffield Steelers at Braehead. And with the Sheffield team lying in third place in the league, Tripp knows that another victory will be no easy task. “The teams we have played in the last few games have been an equal or lesser level compared to us and we have shown that we can stay with them no problem,” he said. “So it’s time for us to show that we can step up and perform against the bigger teams. It’s about learning from those little mistakes but we have a good team and we can achieve a lot so it’s just about how fast we do it.”