STATISTICS don’t always tell the whole story but they are pretty damning when it comes to Newport Gwent Dragons away from Rodney Parade.

The Boxing Day trip to Cardiff will be the Dragons’ 19th away from Newport in the calendar year and they have won just once, the stunning Challenge Cup quarter-final at Gloucester.

However, in sport we don’t operate with regular diaries and rather than looking at 2016 as a whole we should look at the current campaign, which shows an alarming trend in the first half of the season.

The Dragons have played away from Rodney Parade on eight occasions and Guinness Pro12 bottom club Treviso are the only team that have had to settle for four points rather than five after ‘only’ crossing for three tries at the Stadio Monigo.

Kingsley Jones’ side have shipped 36 tries in those games at an average of 4.5 with their European jaunts providing perhaps the biggest disappointment.

One can reluctantly accept being beaten at Ulster, the Ospreys, Leicester and Leinster but it’s pretty horrendous for the Dragons to have had their line crossed five times by Enisei in crisp conditions in Krasnodar and four times by a much-changed Worcester side.

I had a lucky escape last weekend when I was at a gig by The Charlatans and James rather than being at Sixways Stadium to see the most disappointing result of the season.

A win at Worcester would have gone a long way towards securing a third successive season of European Challenge Cup knockout rugby whereas now, after being thumped 33-20, they need to win three from three and hope other results go their way.

I don’t doubt there will be a response in the return fixture tomorrow – one ‘Born of Frustration’, I suppose you could say – and perhaps the Dragons do need a shrink or an exorcist because they travel as well as BA Baracus.

Their bad case of pteromerhanophobia is seriously hindering the strides that they have made on home soil where they have treated their fans to some pretty entertaining, and winning, rugby.

The Dragons are gunning for a fifth victory on the spin at Rodney Parade this weekend and with January fixtures to come against the Ospreys, Treviso and Enisei, it’s possible that they can eclipse the six on the spin that they managed to string together between March and October of 2015.

Lewis Evans & Co have played with enterprise yet also tenacity with determined defence needed to ride out the storm in periods during the successes against Brive, Connacht, the Scarlets and Edinburgh.

That steel has sadly not been repeated on their travels – 11 tries conceded in 7 games in Newport, 36 in eight away shows that. At times they have just been too easy to score against.

The players and coaches will no doubt be leaving no stone unturned in their bid to get to the bottom of why their performances contrast so starkly but a cure for the travel sickness needs to be found.

The Dragons have traditionally been poor away from home and it is partly that shocking record that has helped make the successes in recent years at Stade Francais, Pau, Newcastle, Leinster, Cardiff Blues and Gloucester so memorable.

The ‘nothing to lose’ approach can be a dangerous one; while it can relax players, it can also give a hint of anything being a bonus. If things aren’t going your way then the devil on the shoulder will be saying ‘well, nothing was expected anyway’.

But if the Dragons are to stay above Edinburgh and the Italians in the Pro12 and reel in Connacht and Cardiff Blues then they simply have to supplement Parade victories with an away scalp or two, while another Euro quarter-final is impossible without a win at the Stade Amedee Domenech.

That can’t happen with a leaky defence – a ‘you score four, we’ll score five’ approach doesn’t really cut it in rugby.

We’ve loved seeing the Dragons play with exuberance at home after watching plenty of pretty grim, kick-heavy rugby in 2015/16.

Tempering some of that enthusiasm and learning to take the sting out of the game when their hosts are enjoying a purple patch is essential because frequent failures away from home leads to increased pressure in Newport.

The Dragons have relished their more enterprising approach at Rodney Parade and we don’t want that to be hindered by players feeling the heat. The grinding it out needs to happen on their travels.

South Wales Argus:

ENGLAND’S players took home a six-figure sum each thanks to a Grand Slam bonus last season, a financial boost that would comfortably cover a year-long stay in a plush Northamptonshire retreat should anyone want to do a bit of contemplation.

Hooker Dylan Hartley added to his lengthy rap sheet when he was dismissed in the Saints’ European hammering at the hands of Leinster last week, a swinging arm added to gouging, biting, punching, swearing, elbowing and head-butting on his list of shame.

Added together, the 30-year-old England skipper has spent over a year on the sidelines suspended and he got things wrong at Franklin’s Gardens last week. Only slightly wrong, but badly wrong.

The hooker was trying to give Sean O’Brien a bit of a cheap shot with a swinging arm to the flanker’s ribs but the Irishman fell and was clattered in the head.

Hartley is a touch fortunate to only get six weeks but it was an incident that highlights the fine margins that players deal in and at professional level there is little wiggle room courtesy of cameras.

Think back to Rynard Landman’s red card for Newport Gwent Dragons against Connacht a couple of years ago, he wanted to make sure visiting fly-half Jack Carty was feeling the heat but timed his challenge wrong and caught him with a stray elbow. Red card, no complaints.

If anything you could argue that the Dragons need a Hartley figure because, as alluded to in the piece above, they can sometimes be a little too nice and easy to play against.

Intimidation and the rough stuff will always be part of rugby but, as ever, it’s knowing how to do it and when.

That’s something Hartley is still struggling to learn, even after effectively having a gap year thanks to his misdemeanours.