Our season is reaching a key phase right now and it seems we are learning some tough lessons along the way.

We entertain Chester in the league this Saturday and go to Sheffield in the BBL Cup on Sunday and I am looking for some reaction to what went on last weekend.

Key phase? You bet it is, what with the ULEB Cup and BBL Trophy about to get underway and our first league visit to Sheffield not too far away.

I asked some tough questions of the players in practice this week after last weekend's events which saw us go down narrowly at London Towers and then beat Newcastle by 20 points while still not playing at our best.

It was a disappointing weekend in terms of team performance. Maybe when you win your first three games of the season you think you're a lot better than you are.

I'm not saying we can't be very good but our concentration, our effort and our togetherness have got to be there. Not just kind of there, they have to be right there, spot on.

We learned some things in defeat at Towers. I didn't think we were too bad as a team but we were really poor individually. The starting five were, in general, pretty bad. We were soft mentally, we didn't execute when we needed to.

I tried to attack their new player Omar Sneed all through the second half because he was in foul trouble and we couldn't get it done. We couldn't get the ball to the guy he was marking all second half, even though we were trying to.

We deserved to lose that game. Towers had a lot of breaks, the ball bounced their way and in the second half we were all over some putbacks and none of them went in.

I also think it was really touchy at our end in terms of some of the decisions that were given.

When Towers put the ball on the floor and looked to drive they got to the free throw line. When we went inside we got clobbered. We're going to see that all year. We're going to have to take hits because we're bigger, we're deeper and, for some reason, that affects how the game is called.

I disrupted the flow against Newcastle by changing players so often. We won, which is important, but I thought again we were poor because we weren't organised.

Admittedly, it's hard to stay organised when guys are out of position and playing with guys they aren't used to playing with. Having said that, it's not that hard to come on court and say: "I'm coming in for you. You were guarding No. 10 so now I'm guarding No. 10" but we failed to do that about seven times. That's junior high school stuff.

What happens now, in terms of who plays when, I don't yet know, but I will ensure our guys take it a notch up concentration-wise.

We have had Sterling Davis, our MVP of the last two seasons, working out with us over the past few days and I hope to see him get fixed up with a club in the near future, though I would not expect it to be here given that our roster is full and we already have all our overseas players both for BBL action and the ULEB Cup.

I can guarantee to you that is a club where a lot of players would love to be right now. I expect to see us prove why with two great performances this weekend.

GO BEARS