In what should have been both the conditions and occasion to get their season back on a winning track, Saturday's visit to the Sports Ground by undefeated Bedlinog was to prove another disappointment for the local team.

Monmouth set about the game more fiercely than has been their recent custom, but Bedlinog with a rampaging back row, still looked to be the team who wanted to win more and the pressure they were achieving in the early stages led eventually to desperate infringement by the home defence and the award against them after fifteen minutes of a penalty try.

The Monmouth pack strangely were dominant almost throughout the game, despite the later substitution of front five stalwarts. J Powell and Stockley, due to injury, and yet there was to be a steady procession of 4 tries against them, two of which were converted, partly due to the eagerness of the visiting team but largely due to a near obsession with giving the ball away once won, either by inaccurate or needless kicking, or plain simple handling errors. The lack of use of the speed on the Monmouth wings was almost a crime but whether there was enough pace in the back row to support such wide play is questionable.

The separate talent and planned moves are there to be used but somehow the overall is disconnected. But until all fifteen players have a burning desire to win and the legs to carry them through the whole game Monmouth will continue to beat the less well equipped sides whilst struggling against the best.

The team itself knows that the best they have encountered this season were all eminently beatable, and perhaps one can see proof of this in the consolation try scored by Andrew Davies after a movement that swept Monmouth the full length of the pitch to score far out in the right hand corner. But scores in the 40th minute, bringing the score to 5-24, do not win games when so much good possession has been wasted earlier on, but it did at least leave one wondering what might have been.

Time to reflect, with the next league games being RTB Ebbw Vale away on 30 November and home against Nantyglo on 7 December.