WE have two important British Basketball League matches this weekend, starting tomorrow night against Bristol Flyers at Worcester Arena before travelling to Cheshire Phoenix on Sunday.

I am looking for a positive reaction from the players, particularly after our disappointing 80-71 BBL Trophy quarter-final defeat at Leicester Riders last Saturday.

We were the holders of the trophy and, despite Alex Owumi scoring 19 points, we just weren’t good enough.

We are in a good position in the league table but for us to stay where we are in the league, or perhaps win it, we need all our guys to show up.

For us to be a competitive team we need all nine guys to show up and play and we cannot rely on only two or three guys like, perhaps, we did last year.

We have been involved in a lot of close matches and it might be exciting for the fans — and we’ve noticed that our home attendances have been growing lately.

But other teams might be encouraged by the close results. Sooner or later, like we did against Leicester, we will miss a couple of shots or have a bad night offensively or defensively and lose to a team that, perhaps, we should not.

The BBL Trophy was the first major competition we won and it was always going to be hard playing away to Leicester in front of big crowd, on a tight court with the home crowd upon us.

It takes a different breed of person to come through that challenge. You have to be strong-minded and strong-willed and you have to be tough mentally.

Maybe one or two of our players didn’t really show up and show their true potential and that’s just down to a lack of experience.

All the games we have won fairly comfortably this season were because we have won the battle of the rebounds and, in the game against Leicester, they almost out-rebounded us by two to one.

We didn’t take care of our own defensive boards and if you couple that with the fact we only scored 71 points, we were well below par.

Last Friday, we managed to edge past Surrey United 71-70 but I thought we were horrible.

We are living on a knife-edge - we have had a couple of games lately that we should have put to bed early on but we have left it until the last shot of the game. Surrey had a shot to win it and it rimmed out.

We are still up there fighting for the Championship title but it was not a good performance and it really disappointed me with the effort we showed on the court.

I think we have the right players out there but we have short mental blocks in matches. In this league, you could be 12 points ahead and then, in a heartbeat, the game is level.