Tenby United 11 pts. pontarddulais 43
When a side is attempting to rebuild and get new players and combinations running and operating smoothly, the last thing it requires is constant change to playing personnel.
Tenby United had this in spades on Saturday, for their game against second placed Pontarddulais, and paid heavily as a consequence and leaked seven tries.
The side originally selected showed two positional and five new players drafted in from the week before, due to several players being unavailable and/or injuries, and to compound the problem, suffered even further reorganisation when three selected players cried off due to injuries.
The game had only just started when as a consequence of all the changes and players playing out of position, the Pontarddulais number eight picked up from the base of the scrum, broke blind and fed the scrum-half, who in turn released the wing, who trotted over unopposed under the sticks for the opening score, with the Tenby players trying to sort out who should have done what.
From the restart, the visitors were penalised and Del Brace struck his attempted penalty confidently through the uprights to at least get the home side on the scoreboard.
To be fair to the home side, spurred on and well led by their player/coach Emori Katalau, they started to pull their game together and, despite spilling the ball in midfield, they capitalised on a Bont error when Dai Meryick skilfully picked up the ball and scooted half the length of the field for a try which was converted by Del Brace, to give the United a somewhat fortunate lead.
Unfortunately this lead was very short-lived when a stupid trip on a Pontarddulais player, as he chased a ball heading for the Tenby try line, was spotted by referee Lawrence, who duly awarded a penalty try.
The bad luck continued for the Seasiders as Jonathan Lloyd, the visitors' number 10, threw the most outrageous dummy and from deep inside his own half, linked with centre Hopkins, who scampered over wide out for try number three.
To complete the scoring, in a very patchy first half, Brace slotted over a second penalty to bring the scores to 11-19.
The crowd settled down for the second half, probably expecting a repeat of last week's performance, when the United really got their act together and put the opposition to the sword - not to be.
A combination of fitness (or lack of it), missed tackles, poor kicking and bungled moves allowed Ponarddulais to totally dominate proceedings and despite the efforts of Emori to get his side into gear, the expected second half revival simply did not materialise as the visitors ran in a further four tries to close the game out at 11-43.
In fact, the defeat could have been considerably heavier if Pontarddulais had played as a team in the second half. Seeing the slack marking and missed tackles, several of their players started to try to get their names on the score sheet and a number of scoring opportunities were spurned.
The ironical thing about the game was that despite running in for a hatful of tries, Pontarddulais were not that good a side, but on the day, they simply did enough to overwhelm a very dispirited home side.
Emori and his support team will need to get the troops to rally round for next week's away encounter at Trimsaran, otherwise it will be a long hard season battling for survival and points at the foot of Division Four West.
Tenby fielded: Scott McLaughlin (Dan Colley), Dai Meryrick, Gavin Brace (capt.), Dave Otten, Barry Bowen, Del Brace (Neil Powling), Jake McFadden, Damian Hanolan, Mike Lewis, Simon Griffiths (Robbie Clark), Matt Broadhurst (Terence John), Emori Katalau, Gareth Nock, Jimmy Davies, Wyndham Williams.