DRAGONS chief Bernard Jackman took heart from his side’s performance against Exeter Chiefs, despite them conceding 50 points and shipping eight tries at Sandy Park.

Saturday’s 50-24 defeat to the English champions came on the back of 40-15 and 71-21 losses to Montpellier and Northampton Saints respectively the previous weekend.

But even after a sickness bug had swept through the squad in the build-up to the game in Devon, the Dragons were still in with a shout of winning until the last quarter.

And Jackman certainly felt there were reasons to be cheerful from a Dragons perspective.

He said: “If you take away the last 15 minutes it was a positive experience.

“We saw enough in that game in terms of what we’ve been working on at Ystrad Mynach, trying to develop an attacking system and defensive system, so that comforts us a little bit.

“It was comforting for me that we saw some shape in our attack, some good defensive sets and we finished the game with a lot of our transition players on the field.

“And it was a great experience for them to play against the English champions away from home.”

He continued: “If you want to build a system it’s going to take some time, but I think we’ve got an intelligent group of players who want to play attacking rugby.

“We’ve just got to get the balance right between keeping the ball in hand and going for attacking kicks. I thought we got some of that right, some of it we didn’t.

“The difference between a championship team and a team who finish in the bottom half of the table is not backing up error after error.

“We had to work much harder for our scores than they did and that’s something that we’ll be looking to fix pretty quickly.

“It’s a lot of points but there are enough positives in that game to leave with a positive mindset and look forward to the review on Monday.”

Jackman, who gave valuable game time to the likes of Dan Suter, Luke Garrett, Leon Brown, Max Williams, Jared Rosser and Connor Edwards, also paid a huge compliment to Saturday’s opponents.

“Exeter are probably a role model for us in terms of a club because if you look back at what Rob Baxter did six or seven years ago in the Championship, he had a vision, a clear style of play he wanted to develop, and he got the right people in who believed in that,” he added.

“This club is a great success story. It’s a great traditional ground, great support and a really good team, and that’s what we want to get to with the Dragons.”

The Dragons’ final pre-season friendly sees them take on Glasgow at Ebbw Vale’s Eugene Cross Park on Friday.