NEWPORT Gwent Dragons boss Kingsley Jones lamented a "missed opportunity" to end their Guinness Pro12 away hoodoo when beaten at Cardiff Blues.

The Dragons' losing streak in the Guinness Pro12 away from Rodney Parade will stretch until at least February when they travel to Cork to face Munster after they lost 27-16 at BT Sport Cardiff Arms Park.

They have now lost 20 games on the spin in the league away from Newport, a nightmare run that stretches back to a success in Treviso in March 2015.

The Dragons were downed in Cardiff despite a lively try-scoring performance by wing Ashton Hewitt and it leaves them ninth in the table at the halfway stage, a whopping 11 points back on the seventh-placed Blues.

They don't have long to lick their wounds with the Ospreys heading to Rodney Parade on New Year's Day and better will be needed against the Pro12 title hopefuls.

"We can't do anything about what's just gone on out there, we just have to use the time over the next six days to make sure we are better," said head coach Jones at the Arms Park.

"But this was an opportunity missed. We are good enough to come here and do better than that and have six days to turn that around."

The Dragons have won their last five on the spin in Newport but have failed to reproduce that form on their travels, with Jones frustrated by their error count and a turgid, scoreless second half.

"We talk about accuracy a lot and it's been better this season but we gave the Blues two kicks out on the full and the chance to attack us," he said.

"The message before the game was discipline and playing the game outside the 22, if we'd done that I felt we would have won."

"There are lots of little things in the game that I am disappointed with from ourselves but also a couple of decisions, big decisions that tend not to go your way away from home," he continued.

"We will be looking hard at ourselves and have six days to turn our inaccuracies into a positive performance against the Ospreys. I don't think we are far away but at the highest level the detail is the difference in big games."

The Dragons felt aggrieved by the momentum-shifting decision to penalise Hewitt for getting up off the floor when deemed to have been tackled in the first half along with referee Ben Whitehouse's call to yellow card lock Rynard Landman for the way that he cleared out Wales wing Alex Cuthbert at a ruck.

"I don't know where the game is going if we are going to go down that route," said Jones.