Dragons director of rugby Dean Ryan has threatened to axe players as his side's wait for a home victory this season went on with defeat to the Scarlets.
It's been a year since the Dragons last won at Rodney Parade, beating the west Walians in a Rainbow Cup clash last April, but there was no repeat of that on Saturday as Dwayne Peel's side righted the wrongs of last week to record a 38-19 win. However, despite the scoreline, there was a chance for the Dragons to back up last week's win in Llanelli, having come back from 17-0 down to lead 19-17 around the hour mark.
A late collapse, though, meant their search for a third win of a tough campaign went awry, leaving Ryan furious afterwards. The Dragons boss bemoaned the number of errors, adding that some players could be dropped for going off-script.
Read next: The man whose job it is not to 'f*** up' Louis Rees-Zammit
“Our error rate and our quality of play is not good enough,” said Ryan. “That is something that we have got to address. We have got to get to a stage where we don’t pick them, and that’s quite difficult for us because it’s quite clear at the moment that when we lose people our levels of depth are not there.
“The only thing that is going to change that is that we won’t pick them, because we are quite aligned in what we talk about but we are not aligned in what happens out there. There are two or three mistakes in that second half that put them straight back on the five-metre line, which is not acceptable.
“They were there for the taking when we got to that point at 19-17, get back into their half and hold onto the ball and something would have come for us. But for some reason we thought about other things and that is something that we have to be really hard on next week.”
Last week's win over the Scarlets at Parc y Scarlets was the Dragons' first since the victory at Connacht in October. The Dragons' worst season is currently the 2017/18 campaign, when Bernard Jackman's side managed just two wins and two draws.
Right now, Ryan's Dragons have two wins and a solitary draw to their name. With away trips to Zebre and Ospreys and home matches against Cardiff and the Lions to finish the season, chances are limited to avoid an all-time low campaign without a home victory.
For Ryan, it appears to be an issue that he can't quite put his finger on - with the director of rugby accusing his players of talking the talk without walking the walk. “We are too often sitting in changing rooms talking about what we could have done, we are not taking ownership of things,” Ryan added.
“It’s a common theme and sadly that’s something that I can’t force on the side, because the quality of depth isn’t there, but that is something that we are working towards. We have to change and you need to ask why we are not doing the things that we talk about doing.
“We have got to mature because we are not here just to entertain, we want wins. There is a level of maturity that comes with taking performances to wins, and we are not showing it. We gifted them opportunities in the first half hour. We should have scored twice in that first 20 minutes as well as giving them two tries.
“We talked about playing more with the ball but then we just coughed it up and they scored twice from no pressure. That is just not good enough. Our error rate in that period was just not good enough. We got ourselves back to a point where I thought the game was coming to us and then we just once again haemorrhaged errors.
“People were jumping around doing different things and ultimately the Scarlets’ drive and scrum at the end, after we lost Will Rowlands, Aaron Wainwright and Aki Seiuli, we didn’t have the power to stop that."
