Tigers NIHL coach Jason Parry will tell his players to ignore the “huge bonus” of play-off qualification, as he prepares for Sunday’s trip to title-chasing Blackburn Hawks.
Parry’s men are now unlikely to feature in the Moralee Conference end-of-season tournament, following a run of just one win and a draw in five games.
They still retain a faint mathematical hope of gate-crashing the party in Sheffield, although that would rely on both Solway and Billingham losing games in the next few weeks.
For Parry, the target now is to take away the lessons of a season that saw Telford occupy third place for much of the early running.
He said: “There are three games left to play, so I want the guys to play as well as possible in those matches and hopefully finish as high as they can in the table.
“We can’t be relegated now, which is a good achievement. You have to bear in mind that most people, apart from us, were expecting Telford to drop back down again this year.
“The guys will concentrate on their own game and leave the other teams to worry about themselves. If we do find ourselves in the play-offs, then that would be a huge bonus.
“This season is a massive lesson for the guys.”
The Tigers NIHL boss will again wait on the results of late fitness tests before naming his squad on Sunday, as the league campaign begins to draw to a close.
He added: “The season is a marathon, not a sprint, and we had a great first half to the year. The second half hasn’t gone well and ultimately, we haven’t played well enough.
“You can blame different things, such as injuries and the like, but at the end of the day we’ve only got ourselves to blame. We’ve thrown away games, but overall I can’t fault the effort of the guys.”
Sunday’s match in Blackburn faces off at 5.45pm.
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