No joy for Weldon in slaughtering some good friends

Weldon contributed the opening goal and two assists in a 9-1 drubbing at Planet Ice as the city side showed no mercy to short-staffed visitors.

But Phantoms will have taken considerably more satisfaction from the fact that result completed a third four-point weekend of the season, which was enough to propel them back into fourth place in the standings.

Weldon said: “It is always tough to see a team lose by such a heavy scoreline – even more so when we have good friends on the team as many of us do with Manchester.

“But we had a job to do and we had to put our full focus on doing it as well as we could. We were a class above them in all honesty.

“Manchester do have some really good guys on their roster, but we have four strong lines now and we have a lot of depth.

“We started the season pretty slowly in terms of putting the puck in the net, but it was only ever going to be a matter of time before the goals started flowing.

“That is exactly what has happened and we have so many players capable of creating and scoring.”

The victory against Manchester certainly didn’t come complete with the sort of late scare that a 5-4 success in Bracknell the previous night featured.

Phantoms appeared to be cruising when holding a five-goal advantage with less than 10 minutes remaining, but they were made to sweat before emerging in possession of two points.

“Maybe we took our feet off the gas towards the end in Bracknell,” admitted Weldon. “But we were comfortably the better team for the majority of that game.

“They got a couple of lucky bounces and also scored a couple of good goals to make it a hell of a lot closer than it should have been.

“It highlighted that Bracknell are not a team who will not roll over to die – and that’s something we need to remember when we play them at home in each of the next two weekends.”