BOSS Dean Ryan admitted that despite beating the Cheetahs, it wasn’t a “smart performance” from his Dragons team at Rodney Parade.

Sam Davies’ last-gasp penalty secured a dramatic 13-10 success in Saturday evening’s Guinness PRO14 clash.

“We talked in the changing rooms and were pretty disappointed,” said Ryan.

“Earlier in the season we were quite smart at how to win games, we won a couple of derbies in the last few minutes by being smart.

“The Cheetahs handed it to us by trying to be overly ambitious on a night when it wasn’t there.

“We’ll take the four points, but it didn’t come from us being smart.”

He added: “I thought we did well for the first 40 minutes because it was tough with the hail and snow coming in.

“We only gave them one chance really, apart from that they didn’t really look like scoring.

“For the second week in a row we haven’t really been able to take advantage of having the wind behind us against a side that’s got nothing to lose by playing out.

“We’ve got to look at that because it wasn’t a smart performance by us. I don’t think we’ll hide from the fact that it wasn’t our best.

“It did highlight today we weren’t on one script, our lineout struggled, and we didn’t look like we had momentum in those latter stages.

“I thought Lewis Evans came on and actually gave us some real momentum just from understanding what the game needed.

“We had Josh Reynolds and Ellis Shipp playing, they’re 20-year-olds against a Cheetahs pack.”

Commenting on the awful conditions, he said: “I’d say you don’t get those conditions very often, but we’ve had nothing but those conditions.

“We haven’t played for five weeks then we’ve had two weeks playing in horrendous conditions.

“Some of those games are just throwaway games, you take your points and move on.”