Welsh rugby: Six talking points from URC weekend

Scarlets celebrated only their third league win of the season

All four Welsh regions saw games go down to the wire as the United Rugby Championship (URC) season entered the final straight.

With the Six Nations over, eyes turned to whether Welsh rugby can salvage some pride in the domestic league.

Scarlets pulled off a last-gasp win with the briefest of man of the match performances.

Cardiff kept up their remarkable knack of picking up bonus points, but Ospreys and Dragons were left empty-handed.

So what did we learn about the regions from the 12th round of the URC?

Scarlets' home comforts

Dwayne Peel will be hoping Parc y Scarlets can provide the setting for a late season revival.

The late 16-13 win over Benetton was the first of five home games in their final seven URC matches.

"We knew from the structure of our season that we were backloaded with home games and we want to make this a tough place to come," said Peel.

"We've been up and down in recent weeks, but hopefully now we have some momentum.

"The break was good, but the returning Wales boys have really brought some energy. It would have been easy for them to feel sorry themselves but they were all looking forward to pulling on the Scarlets jersey again. That meant a lot."

The win was enough to lift them one place in the table and they hope to have Taine Plumtree and Ryan Elias back to face Glasgow on Saturday.

However, wing Steff Evans is facing a spell out of the game following an Achilles injury.

Ospreys play-offs hamstrung

Alex Cuthbert returned earlier this month following a year out of the game with injuries

How dearly could Alex Cuthbert's hamstring cost Ospreys?

Having scored his first try for more than a year, in the 27-17 defeat by Munster, the injury-plagued Wales wing looked set to score a second in the final attack of the game only to pull up clutching the back of his leg in pain.

It would have been a fourth try for Ospreys and brought them within seven points of Munster.

Given just five points separate seven teams in the race for the play-offs - from Stormers in fifth to Ospreys in tenth - Toby Booth could not help but rue two missed bonuses.

"You wonder about your luck when that happens," he said. "And in a congested league, those two points could be massive."

Booth added he was "devastated" for Cuthbert who is awaiting the results of a scan to discover the extent of the damage.

Dragons face wooden spoon decider

Not for the first time this month, Welsh and Italian players will battle to avoid a wooden spoon.

This time it is Dragons and Zebre who meet at Rodney Parade on Friday night, having slipped into the bottom two places after Scarlets and Sharks both won.

It was hard on Dragons following a gutsy display against second-placed Bulls, who needed two tries in the final minutes to wrap up a 31-10 win in Newport.

"It's tough (going bottom of the league) and we're not happy about it, but we've been sitting in and around that area all season," said head coach Dai Flanagan.

"We missed massive opportunities at home at the start of the season against Edinburgh and Cardiff and we knew they might come back to bite us. Next weekend is a huge game for us."

Lloyd at 15

Only two players have beaten more defenders in the URC this season than Ioan Lloyd

What do you do if you're Dwayne Peel and have Wales' first two choice fly-halves? The answer was to play one at full-back.

"Ioan at 15 was electric at times. He's got great feet and gets over the gainline," said Peel afterwards.

Gareth Anscombe made the switch for Wales, as did James Hook previously. Could it be an option for Warren Gatland?

"Its a really interesting dynamic," ex-Wales fly-half Elinor Snowsill told Scrum V.

"It's always good to have a 10 who can cover 15. You can use it to your advantage by having a second play-maker and two sets of eyes in attack.

"The challenge is defence, which is very difficult. We saw with the first Benetton try that was quite a simple tackle that Ioan should have made."

Cardiff's tough run in

No player has made more turnovers in the URC than Cardiff's Thomas Young

Cardiff may have lost an eighth game of the league campaign, but are proving tough opposition to shake off after collecting seventh losing bonus in the 17-13 loss at Glasgow Warriors.

They managed what Leinster and Stormers could not by becoming the first team to take a point from Scotstoun against the URC's third-placed team this season.

But their next five games are all against teams in the top eight, and only one - Edinburgh - is at home.

"We've played a lot of home games [and] played bottom half of the table teams so I knew Glasgow was our first real test in the league," said head coach Matt Sherratt.

"Munster is a tough place to go, another top-half-of-the-table team, and we need to show the same kind of fighting spirit we have at home."

Six-minute man of the match

Eduan Swart may have only taken the field for Scarlets in the 74th minute yet still managed to walk away with the man of the match award.

The replacement hooker, who touched down at the back of a driving maul for the match-winning try, looked utterly perplexed when handed his award by grinning team=mate Gareth Davies.

Shaking his head, Swart said: "I did nothing, I basically fell over the line because the rest of the forwards did everything. But it's a massive win."