SWINDON Storm’s defensive coordinator Rich Westley believes his side’s 28-3 victory over Jurassic Coast Raptors showed the rest of the league they can compete.

Storm were blown away by Bournemouth Bobcats the previous week following a dominant victory in their opening fixture of the season against Hastings Conquerors.

And despite finding themselves 3-0 down after the first quarter, Storm roared back thanks to touchdowns from Dan Thorne, Iain Eastman, Brent Johnson-Flippance and Ryan Ratko to send a clear message out to the rest of the division.

With two victories from their opening three games, Westley is content with the start his team has made and was overjoyed to see the kind of reaction they produced after a difficult defeat against Bournemouth.

He said: “We wanted to see a reaction from the Bournemouth game, and we thought it was important to bounce back from last week, dust ourselves off and go again.

“If we prepared properly, we could show the rest of the league, through having a quick start and getting the result, that we are here to compete.

“The players all took that on board and showed it once we got onto the field.”

Defensive coordinator Westley felt the most noticeable change to the harrowing defeat at home to the Bobcats was the players’ attention to detail on assignments.

The player-coach said this was especially noticeable on his side of the ball.

Westley said: “We did a lot of work during the week in terms of making sure that assignments were kept to and that was the biggest difference.

“On defence, it was 11 guys doing the right thing pretty much every time.

“Plus, we didn’t really concede any penalties on defence either, so that just means we controlled the ball far better in this game than we did against Bournemouth.

“The three points we conceded was from a field goal as a result of a couple of plays where we didn’t all sync up as a team.

“After that, we came back strong and didn’t give them anything.”