Barclay: “You don’t get anything for being top of the table at this stage.”

With eight wins from nine rounds in the Guinness PRO12 Scarlets are nestled at the top of the table as the competition takes a break for the third and fourth rounds of the European Rugby Champions Cup.

A victory over Benetton Treviso on the weekend saw the Scarlets overtake Connacht in the league standings, after the Irish province lost to Cardiff Blues on Friday evening.

With Ken Owens sidelined with a toe injury Scottish international John Barclay was handed the captaincy armband for the all-important clash against Treviso leading the side to a 20-22 victory on Saturday afternoon.

Speaking after the game Barclay was pleased with the victory but was also realistic that there’s a long way to go with the PRO12 season still in its infancy.

He said: “It’s nice but you don’t get anything for being top of the table at this stage in the season. It’s a long season and we’ve only played nine league games.

“It’s nice now with two European games to sit there and look at it and think we’ve worked pretty damn hard to get there and we’ve played some scrappy games. I don’t think we’ve played our best rugby but we’re grinding out good wins. It’s pleasing but it’s still early days.

“There’s also not a great deal separating one to four, you get very little at the end of the season for saying we were top after nine games, we’ll keep our heads down. Teams will still expect to be able to beat us because we haven’t been top four for a couple of years.

“It’s up to us to keep plugging away and show them that it’s not just a fluke at the start of the season.”

The Scarlets didn’t have an easy run of it on the weekend with Treviso scoring three tries of their own heading into the final ten minutes in the lead.

Commenting on the performance as a whole Barclay added: “We’ve always come away to the Italian teams and struggled a little bit. We started well today; to be fair we didn’t expect them to play with so much width.

“We felt we let them back in the game a little bit with some ill discipline. They were pretty accurate and they came back into it. We felt if we got back down there we could score because of the way we were playing when we had the ball.

“At the end of the day we’ve come away with another win so we’re happy.”

Scarlets return to the Parc on Saturday 19^th December for the fourth round of the European Rugby Champions Cup clash against Glasgow Warriors, kick-off 7.45pm.

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