Fife Flyers: Welsh road trip as team targets play-off points

The club then faces an overnight journey back to Kirkcaldy to host Manchester Storm in the first of two games against their play-off rivals which could hold one of the keys to securing a place in the post-season championships.

They go into the games boosted by a big four-point weekend with wins over Coventry Blaze and Dundee Stars - and a sense that their season is finally about to take off.

The club will check on Chris Lawrence after illness kept him out of Sunday’s game and also Wednesday’s Challenge Cup tie against Sheffield Steelers. If he recovers, they will then decide which player is the healthy scratch.

And that decision won’t be taken until minutes before face-off.

Flyers have put every player into the warm-up ahead of making the call who skates and who sits in the stands.

Jeff Hutchins, associate coach explained: “We want everyone ready to go right up until we let them know.

“Everyone warms up and then someone gets a tap on the shoulder. If you are healthy, you should be ready to go.

“We haven’t had the luxury of doing this before, but went into the summer with this intention. It didn’t play out that way because of a catalogue on injuries, but we are now at that stage and on the cusp of turning this season round and making sure we make the play-offs.”

Flyers have lost all three head to heads with Cardiff this season - one was a 4-3 OT loss - but their record against Storm is good, with two excellent road wins in three meetings.

“We feel confident going into this weekend,” added Hutchins. “We had a target of points for a five-game segment and we’ve met that already. We’ll then start again with the next five-game segment.”

“We have the best penalty kill in the league, and our powerplay in the last five matches is around 20% which is fantastic.

“We dominated the game in Dundee, had 60% at the face-off dot and outplayed them.

There are a lot of positives right now as we get healthy.”