NEIL Shillingford says Dudley Kingswinford are in a better place to handle this season’s play-off challenge.

DK booked second place in Midlands One West with a dominant 97-26 success over Sutton Coldfield at Heathbrook last Saturday.

DK bagged their biggest victory of the campaign to book a date thanks to tries from Dan Marsh (2), Charles Baffour (2), Stef Shillingford (2) Matt Perks (2), James Fildes, Jake Thompson, Jordan Brookes, Tom Walker, Will Hancocks, Sam Vaughan, Joe Dunn.

The win sets up a play-off battle at Midlands One East counterparts Paviors on April 27.

The director of rugby at Heathbrook is looking forward to the challenge.

He said: “It’s a case of achieving the goal we set out to and now it’s about that next step. That play-off game is a one-off game so it’s no good trying to reinvent the wheel, we’ve just got to take what we’ve been doing all season, take it into that play-off and do it to the best of our ability.

“We’ll give the lads Tuesday off, have a run out Thursday and get back into it next week and build for the following Saturday.

“We’ll take our game anywhere and back ourselves.

“We’re in a better position this year than we were last year.

“I think the mental approach and psychology is different. We’ve been there and tasted it.

“We’ve had bad spells this season and worked it out and got back to the top of our game and we’ve adapted during games, which we didn’t quite do last year.

“We’re going into the unknown a little with Paviors but we know we can adapt during the game.”

On the ruthless display to put Sutton to the sword, he added: “It was just a case of getting the job done.

“In the second half it’s easy to fall out of structure a little bit so again we can be overly critical about letting in 26. Defensive patterns let us down a bit but it happens when you’ve got a scoresheet like that.

“It was just that we switched off a little once the job was done.”