Sheffield Steelers had a 3 goal lead before the evening was halfway through and against just a single Flames reply, they were able to skate through the contest and close out time on a 3-1 defeat of Spectrum’s men.
Mitchell Balmas commenced the evening’s scoring about 12 minutes in and Steelers held that lead into the 2nd.
At 24:14 Robert Dowd extended the visitors’ advantage to a pair and another by Daniel Leavens less than 2 minutes later had Steelers in command, up by 3. Flames finally converted a chance with a Matt Alvaro strike confirmed by video review and Flames trailed by a pair to start the final set, but with no further scoring in the 3rd the Challenge Cup points fell to the Steelers side of the ledger.
Eamon McAdam turned away 25 of 28 shots while Matt Greenfield was 26 of 27 for Steelers.
“I know the score and that we were on the wrong side it, but it didn’t entirely reflect how the game went,” explained Paul Dixon.
“We maybe deserved a bit better than that, and for sure deserved more than the one scrambly goal we did get.”
“It was a pretty even game for the most part, and we created some good opportunities to have been able to kept it tighter and maybe a chance to push for the win at the end.”
“It didn’t transpire that way so we go back to training and look at how to improve, but I can’t say that we were necessarily the clear cut 2nd place team on this night so we can take that into training for some positive thought as we go from there.”
