Dragons leave it to late against Eels

On a night where both sides were playing for pride it was the Eels who left with more of it, running in five tries to lead 30-6 midway through the second half before a double to Kurt Mann in the final four minutes brought a semblance of respectability to the scoreline.

With both sides out of finals contention Paul McGregor and Brad Arthur used the match to look to the future but it was the Eels coach who had the most to smile about with Bevan French making the most of his chance in the No. 1 jumper with a hat-trick of tries.

Young halfback Drew Hutchison also bagged a four-pointer in the first half but, in a frustratingly familiar scenario this season, the Dragons left it until the dying stages to play with any enterprise, sinking to their seventh loss from their past eight games. For the second straight week  McGregor was left ruing a costly second half lapse.

"There was a section both games, this week and last week, where we dropped our guard for a period and the other teams really get on top of us,” McGregor said.

“Last week we leaked a few tries in consecutive minutes and we did it again tonight which is disappointing. They're very physical and they play nice and direct and I thought we matched that early.

“Unfortunately we weren't able to do it for 80 minutes and that's been a bit of our year. If you look at our year we've been in the contest for 50 minutes but we just haven't been playing 80 minutes of footy hard enough.

“It's hard this time of year when you can't make finals footy and this was our first week we've played with that after making it last year. It's sort of new territory for everyone and we just stayed in the sheds at halftime.”

The loss was soured further by potentially season-ending injuries to star forwards Tyson Frizell and Tariq Sims, putting Frizell’s hopes of a maiden Test jumper at season’s end in jeopardy.

French crossed in the 16^th minute off a neat offload from Semi Radradra with Michael Gordon’s conversion giving the home side a 6-0 lead.

Kenny Edwards’ 30^th minute try was embarrassingly simple, with the Eels back-rower taking a quick penalty tap 15 metres out from the Dragons line and strolling across untouched to extend the lead to 12.

The Dragons forced three straight line dropouts in the five minutes before the break and the pressure told when Hutchison barged his way across to cut the margin to six at halftime. 

French crossed for his second eight minutes after the resumption and completed his hat-trick with a brilliant 62^nd minute try to push the lead out to 24-6.

Gordon crossed to take a 30-6 lead with 10 minutes to play before Mann’s late double brought the final score to a more flattering 30-18.