OSPREYS IN A NINE-TRY AVALANCHE AGAINST DRAGONS

THE Ospreys kept up their hopes of a United Rugby Championship play-off place with a nine-try win over the Dragons in Swansea.

- BEN JAMES Rugby writer [e-mail]

Tries from Will Spencer, Dewi Lake, Ben Warren, Kieran Hardy, Reuben Morgan-Williams and braces from Dan Edwards and Keelan Giles signed off the club's final season at the Swansea.com Stadium in style, as it kept their chances of a top eight finish alive.

In recent weeks, the Ospreys' resurgence under Mark Jones had stuttered a little.

Back-to-back derby defeats to the Scarlets and Cardiff in the league sandwiched their European knock-out exit in the Challenge Cup quarter-final.

Defeat to the Dragons would not only seen them lose three in a row for the first time since October, but it would have effectively marked the end of their hopes of reaching the play-offs, with away games against Sharks and Lions to come.

For weeks, this game had been billed as Justin Tipuric’s farewell match on home soil. In the end, a pectoral injury suffered in their European exit two weeks ago ruled him out of a occasion that, in all honesty, the humble man from Trebanos wouldn’t exactly enjoy.

Whether there is to be another outing for the man in the blue scrum cap before his switch to coaching, with two games to come in South Africa, remains to be seen.

However, Wales second-row Adam Beard did at least recover from injury to saviour his own Swansea farewell ahead of a move abroad.