Frustration continues to grow for Stingrays

The defeats stretched the East Yorkshire club’s winless streak to six games and leaves them bottom of the overall Elite League standings.

Sylvain Cloutier’s team had taken an early lead on Tayside when Jereme Tendler grabbed his seventh of the campaign at 8.39.

That was how it stayed until Doug Krantz levelled for the home side at 25.39. Despite plenty of attempts on goal for both sides, even five minutes of overtime couldn’t separate the two Gardiner Conference rivals.

Janis Ozolins succeeded in the shoot-out, but Cale Tanaka and Tendler missed, enabling Dundee to grab the extra point thanks to successful efforts from Sami Ryhanen and Mike Wirll.

“I thought we played a solid game,” said player-coach Cloutier. “They got a bit of luck with their goal and that is something we are not getting a lot of at the moment. But you create your own luck.

“The puck is not going in for us right now. We have guys who can score and we were scoring a lot of goals at the start of the season.

“We just need to stay positive.”

Hull have an immediate chance to avenge Sunday night’s defeat to Dundee – as well as the other two defeats to Jeff Hutchins’s team – when they welcome the Stars to Hull Arena next Saturday.

Saturday night had begun well for Hull at the National Ice Centre when, after an even first period, the home side went into the interval frustrated at only being one goal ahead.

David Clarke was the only player to get on the scoreboard, finding a way past Ben Bowns at 12.04.

But four second-period goals saw Hull’s hopes effectively ended with one-time signing Guillaume Lepine making it 2-0 at 25.21 on the powerplay.

A short-handed strike from Matt Francis followed at 34.13 before two goals in 32 seconds put the Panthers 5-0 up – David Ling’s strike at 38.14 being followed by another from Jason Beckett.

Bruce Graham wrapped up the scoring just over a minute into the third period.

“We played well in the first period, but the wheels fell off in the second,” admitted Cloutier.

“We beat ourselves, the second period was not good enough. You can’t give teams like Panthers that much momentum – it was disappointing.”