Leeds Knights coach Ryan Aldridge on Bow Neely and why Peterborough Phantoms will again be threat in NIHL National

Two days out from his team’s season-opening double-header weekend against Bristol Pitbulls, Leeds Knights’ head coach Ryan Aldridge was contemplating having to go into the games with just four players defencemen.

But within 24 hours, his concerns had been allayed, first by the arrival of 19-year-old Bow Neely, followed within hours the green light being given to Bailey Perre to return to action following a short spell out with an upper-body injury.

Given the amount of time Leeds spent on the penalty kill across both games against the Pitbulls - a number of the calls Aldridge believing to be unwarranted by the officials - the addition of the two fresh bodies to the roster on Friday morning proved crucial.

It meant the Knights had the bodies to contend with being short on numbers on a regular basis across the weekend, with Aldridge’s players following up a 7-3 win on the road with a 5-0 win on home ice 24 hours later.

With import D-man Noah McMullin remaining on the sidelines with an upper-body injury for possibly another month, Neely’s arrival was perfectly-timed as far as Aldridge was concerned.

Everything he hoped he would get from the teenager, he got. And then some.

“I thought he was phenomenal,” said Aldridge, of a player he first coached three years earlier at the Okanagan Hockey Academy in Swindon. “He was just the Bow that we had at Okanagan. There’s no drama with him, what you see is what you get. He competes, he battles - he’s a proper hockey player.

“He plays the game in the right way, does all the little things that I like in a player and a D-man to do. He knows how to win a battle, even if the battle isn’t in his favour, he does all those sorts of things well.

“Especially at the point when we were looking a little bit light on the back-end going down to Bristol and with Noah out injured, to get Bow in when we did was huge.

“He brought in everything I hoped he would and more. Given he’s got two more years experience behind him since he last played for me - he’s bigger, stronger and faster.

“Getting Bailey back was great, too. Having them two come into the line-up when we thought we were going to be really short back there was big.”

The Knights remain on home ice for their first game of the weekend when they play host to Peterborough Phantoms, a team who - along with Milton Keynes Lightning - pursued them so relentlessly for the regular season league title last season.

Slava Kouliokov’s team arrive in West Yorkshire looking for their first win of the season having lost out 6-5 to a much-improved Hull Seahawks and then 7-5 on the road at Bees IHC, who Leeds visit on Sunday evening.

Aldridge expects the Phantoms - who edged out his team over two legs in the National Cup Final last season - to be as strong this time around, no doubt keen to add more silverware themselves.

“They are a well-coached hockey team, they’ve kept quite a lot of players from last year and I don’t think by any stretch of the imagination that they are weaker,” added Aldridge.

“Even if they were weaker, they are getting coached to a very high standard which allows them to be in with a chance to win any night.

“They are always a tough opponent, probably even more so after losing their first two games. They are going to want to beat us in their building, so I think it’s going to be a great game of hockey.”