Fife Flyers can get off bottom of the EIHL says McKenzie

The forward says last Saturday’s 8-2 thumping from Sheffield Steelers aside, the Flyers form has picked up over the last few weeks, giving him belief that they can escape finishing the season bottom of the EIHL standings.

“If you take the Sheffield game away over the last five weeks we’ve played good hockey,” he said.

“The way I look at it – where the hell has that been since August?

“We’ve not made big changes, we’re not doing anything different, it’s down to each individual player.

“It’s not a case of calling guys out, at the end of the day we win as a team and we lose as a team.

“We’ve switched it on over the last five weeks and if we’d been like that since August we wouldn’t be in the position that we’re in now.

“I think that’s the most annoying thing for me but there’s not a lot you can do about it.

“You can’t look back and say ‘we should have done this, we should have done that’ because in the long run we know what we should have done.

“We know we’ve shot ourselves in the foot. We know we’re a good team.”

Flyers trail Dundee Stars by four points, though the Tayside team have two games in hand, but McKenzie says nobody at Flyers has thrown in the towel just yet.

“It’s not impossible to catch them, we will try, but we have put ourselves in a really tough spot.

“99 per cent of people who watch hockey will look at the standings and say we’ve no chance.

“We’ve got three games in Belfast. They’re going for the league so it will be tough.

“We play Coventry who are flying right now and Glasgow who need to pick up points so it’s not as if we have any easy games. There are no easy games in the league this year.

“We’ve definitely put ourselves behind the eight ball but we’ve given ourselves a little bit of hope with a couple of wins over the last few weeks but I think overall we can all agree that it’s not been good enough.”

As recently as December in an interview with the Fife Free Press, the 33-year-old said he believed Flyers could win the league and says he finds the decline since then hard to believe.

“We were above Nottingham at that time, look at the contrast now,” he said.

“It’s absolutely bonkers, I can’t believe it.

“It’s sport at the end of the day. You don’t go out to lose games.

“Hopefully as a team and as a club we can learn from it for next year.”

Flyers have a one game weekend with the first of two trips to Belfast – the second being a double header on March 20 and 21.

“We had a success against them here but they play really well at home,” McKenzie says, “but, saying that, Dundee went there and beat them.

“We’re not going to go there thinking ‘we’re going to get beat here’. We have to go there saying ‘we need to win’.

“Every game is a must win for us right now. We understand that. We need every player in our team to play to the best of their ability.”