The scene was different, with the Park floodlit, the Quins U9 providing a guard of honour and television cameras dotted about everywhere, but the outcome depressingly similar when Carmarthen Quins played Llanelli last Saturday. In this higher division there is only a fine line between winning and losing. Scoring opportunities, when they come along, have to be taken for missing them will come back to bite you in the end.
And so it was against Llanelli with the home side completely dominating the first half but failing to secure the scores their territorial advantage demanded. It was a remarkable statistic that the visitors did not handle the ball inside the Carmarthen 22 until ten minutes had elapsed of the second half but still found themselves in the lead.
The game began brightly enough and soon the likes of Ioan Cunningham, Richard Wilkes and Martin Morgan from the pack were making telling gains. Richard Carter, Jason Harries and Darren Daniels began to make breaks, with the latter two being held up short of the line, and Sililo Martens seemed to be running the show from behind his pack.
Eventually at the end of the first quarter, Daniel broke down the wing and managed to slip the ball inside to Gareth Cull who touched down for the try he converted himself off the post.
The Carmarthen forwards and backs continued to hammer the Scarlets defence but the decisive move would not come and their ragged-looking opponents kept holding out somehow. In fact the only further scores came from the boot of Dan Newton who slotted two penalties to keep his team in the game at the interval.
Within two minutes of the restart Newton was successful with a 46m. penalty and the Quins were behind completely against the run of play. Cull put his side back in front a couple of minutes later with his converted penalty and still the home side were looking the better of the two.
Carmarthen were still going through the phases, the forwards kept pressing the opposition line but turnovers were now creeping in and costing them dearly. Carter came up 5m. short and had his inside pass batted into touch with the line clear but again the line out drive was turned over and Llanelli were able to relieve.
Then with the fourth quarter approaching, Newton slotted another penalty and the game began to change. Centres Steve Martin and Nick Reynolds made a couple of dangerous breaks for the visitors and the speedy Jason Howells was becoming a bit of a handful. It was now Llanelli that looked capable of a try as their forwards won more and more breakdown ball and their team started to put together some phase play.
However, the game was eventually decided by kicks and Newton went on to kick two more penalties to make his tally six out of six. For the unfortunate Gareth Cull, it simply was not his night and he was not so successful but really it was the missed try scoring opportunities of the first half that led to this disappointing loss.
Carmarthen Quins frantically threw the ball about until the end determined to get some sort of result but it was not to be with the final score being 10-18 to Llanelli.
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