BRACKNELL Bees players and coaches held a private meeting this week as they look to find ways to turn their fortunes around, writes Dave Wright.

Although they beat Hull Pirates 8-3 at the start of this month, Bees have struggled in recent weeks, going down 8-2 and 2-0 to Peterborough Phantoms before suffering two more defeats at the hands of Basingstoke Bison last weekend.

They lost the away fixture 4-2 and then crashed 7-2 at The Hive with their performance on Sunday being particularly disappointing.

Mistakes cost them two goals inside the opening six minutes and Bees were never able to recover.

When the players returned to their dressing room, the door was firmly shut for 20 minutes.

Team captain Matt Foord came out to tell the News: “We needed a closed-door meeting with coaches and players to sort of regroup a little bit and try to draw a line under this chapter of tough games and start afresh.

“We had a period of good games, but recently we have dropped off a little bit and not really played to our full potential.”

Foord added: “We are still close to making the play-offs. We are seven points behind Sheffield (in eighth place) with a game in hand and we all believe we can close that gap.

“But for that to happen, it needs for all of us to be on the same page and everyone work together.

"Our meeting was to push that to the forefront and let senior players and coaching staff to have a say and see where we can go from here.”

Bees, second from bottom of the table, face a particularly tough programme as they bid to bounce back to winning form with four games in less than a week.

They are home to Guildford Flames on Boxing Day (6pm), away to the same opponents on Tuesday (4pm), then it’s home to Peterborough on Thursday (8pm) and Swindon Wildcats on New Year’s Day (6pm).

“With training this week, it is going to be a busy time, but for me I think it could help us,” said Foord.

“If we can start well on Monday, get into a rhythm and build up confidence, it could put us on a bit of a roll and hopefully we can turn things around.”

Bees are also sweating on the fitness of two players, Scott Spearing and Josh Smith, who both limped off the ice during Sunday’s game due to injury.

Foord commented: “Scott has probably been our best player this year – he’s so dominant.

“It was tough to see him go down, but hopefully, he will be back in the line up as he is really important to us.

“When Josh went down as well it messed our lines up a bit. Hopefully, we will have those guys back this week.”