Our cup quarter-final against Newcastle Eagles this weekend will be as big a game as we have had since I have been with the Brighton Bears.

I am looking for an appropriate response both on and off the court.

We take on Newcastle, the side we beat by 20 in the league last week, at the Brighton Centre on Sunday and the stakes are high. It's a chance to move towards out first piece of silverware and we can do it in our own town and in front of our own fans. What a prospect.

An awful lot has been written on the various basketball websites about what happened at the Triangle last Saturday. I am not going to comment too much on that but what I will say is Newcastle will give us another tremendous contest on Sunday.

One of the comments that was made by Newcastle fans was that they were surprised the crowd was not bigger for last week's game. I will put it this way. Our game was fun, exciting, dramatic, we have a winning team playing really well, and I am very surprised there are not a few thousand people who want to have that for their entertainment. There must be some great things going on around here if you can beat an event like that for your early evening entertainment.

Now we are ready for the re-match at the Brighton Centre. I do not expect our crowd this Sunday to be as big as the one which roared us home against Sheffield recently but I would sure like it to be. We will certainly welcome all the support you can give us.

Maybe fans will turn out hoping to see some more magic from our captain Randy Duck. His 72 points in two days last weekend was quite a feat. Randy has stepped up a gear with this group of team mates and they have got to go with him.

People talk about Newcastle's TJ Walker and Chester's John Thomas being the best point guards in the league but right now it's hard to argue against Randy. It wasn't even a contest between him and TJ last weekend. No doubt TJ will come looking to bounce back this time. The two of them seem to have good battles.

We have not seen Thomas just yet this year but he is down here next weekend. The way Randy is playing at the moment maybe he will give Thomas a surprise as well.

Randy's 40 points at Leicester last week was just one of the ingredients which helped us carry out a very professional job and make it eight wins out of eight in all competitions. We did some really good work up there and played well from start to finish. It was a one-horse race.

Going back to the win over Newcastle, one of the things which was pointed out to me was that we made our runs to win the match immediately after I had been called for a technical foul. It's an interesting theory that teams sometimes need adversity to be sparked into life. I don't think it was the case this time but it has happened with us in the past.

I wasn't trying to get a technical last week, in fact there's no way I deserved one, but I have done things to try and spark teams in the past. Usually I would do that in more dire situations than we were in on Saturday. In fact I have even seen coaches try to get thrown out to try and disrupt the flow of a game they were losing.

Different teams respond to adversity in different ways but the bunch of guys I had here last year seemed to play really well when their backs were against the wall.

Generally though I tend to be confident that, no matter how badly things might be going, good players will come through at some stage of the game. That applies to our current team. You saw the old Coach Nurse a bit when I was on my feet against Newcastle but generally I am letting the guys sort things out for themselves and so far it seems to be working.

Let's hope it continues and we make the semis.

Go Bears!