It's a game they would expect to win under normal circumstances, but if they are anything like Llanelli, Cardiff will have lost a lot of players to their parent region to cover Welsh call ups for the senior side and under 20's, whereas Llandovery will have been able to pick a more settled side.
Llanelli got a real trouncing from Carmarthen Athletic recently, but were playing quite a few youths due to there being no one else available. They looked like they didn't know too much about each other and clearly hadn't played together before. Athletic, in contrast, had a very experienced team out, so a beating wasn't a big surprise, really.
Sorry to be a pedant, but it was Carmarthen
Quins who beat Llanelli heavily recently.
There are two teams in Carmarthen, Quins (who are in the Premiership) and Athletic (who are in the National League). Had the Athletic beaten Llanelli by the margin that the Quins did, it would indeed have been "a bad day at the office" for the (original) Scarlets.
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The French do actually have a salary cap, but there seems to be so many ways of getting around it that it's pretty ineffective.
This is an extract from Wikipedia which attempts to explain the sitution:
"In December 2009, Ligue Nationale de Rugby (LNR), operator of the Top 14, announced it would impose a cap of €8 million, effective with the 2010–11 season. Previously, the only restrictions on team salaries were that wage bills were limited to 50% of turnover and that 10% of the salary budget had to be held in reserve. Along with the announcement of the cap, LNR also declared that the reserve requirement would be raised to 20%, with the previous limitation of 50% of turnover remaining in effect.
The new cap was slightly higher than the highest official wage bill in the 2009–10 season. Also, due to the complex nature of French club administration, clubs were seen as likely to find creative ways to skirt the cap. This was publicly admitted in 2014 by Mourad Boudjellal, owner of current Top 14 power Toulon. Boudjellal found a loophole that allowed him to set up a separate company to supplement the salary of star Jonny Wilkinson by a six-figure amount while staying under the cap.
The Top 14 salary cap was set at €9.5 million for 2012–13. For 2013–14, the cap was increased to €10 million, and in addition youth players are excluded from the cap unless their salaries are more than €50,000. The €10 million total cap will remain in place for three seasons (through 2015–16), but the threshold for exclusion of youth players may be adjusted before any of those seasons. Additionally, each club that has a member of the France national team on its roster (more specifically, one of the 30 players named by the French Rugby Federation to the so-called "elite squad") is allowed to exceed the cap by €100,000 per national team member."
