Invicta Dyamos beat Chelmsford Chieftains 11-9 on aggregate in the NIHL Southern play-off quater-finals

A thrilling play-off tie saw Invicta Dynamos make it through to next weekend’s finals - but it was anything but comfortable.

Invicta were up against Chelmsford Chieftains in the quarter-finals - a week after beating them in the Southern Cup final - and it proved to be another close-fought battle that the Medway side edged, winning 11-9 on aggregate.

Karl Lennon’s men took a 4-2 first-leg lead back to Gillingham on Sunday and led 3-0 on the night after the first period, 7-2 overall, before the Essex side staged a comeback - levelling the aggregate score to 9-9 before Invicta regrouped and won it with goals from Stanislav Lascek and man-of-the-match Rich Harris.

Lennon said: “It probably wasn’t a good one for my heart and the grey hairs in my beard but it was job done in the end, which we are really happy about, but we did make really hard work of Sunday night, especially.

“It wasn’t comfortable at all, not just for me, but for everybody, even my wife said afterwards she was screaming the whole game long and that’s not like her!

“The fans and the families all know what it means and we have been desperate to get to these finals because the club hasn’t done it for five years, in the 20th anniversary season. It felt like it had to be the way we closed our season out to get to that final weekend and thankfully we managed to do it.”

The Mos will head to Milton Keynes over the Easter holiday weekend for those finals.

Getting there wasn’t easy. At the Riverside, Chelmsford on Saturday the Mos didn’t start at their best, possibly suffering from a cup-final hangover having beaten the Chiefs the week before.

Lennon said: “We showed up missing three or four of our players due to work commitments or injury and that was not ideal. We