Last season Bath scored 30 points or more in a match 12 times. So far this term they’ve managed it once.

In the 2014/15 campaign they reached the final of the Aviva Premiership and the quarter-finals of the European Cup.

Mike Ford was named Premiership director of rugby of the season. His fly-half son, George, picked up the player’s award.

A third Bath man, centre Jonathan Joseph, was acclaimed as England’s outstanding player.

This time around Ford senior is feeling the heat after six defeats in 11 matches which leave Bath eighth in the league and unlikely to get out of their Champions Cup group.

As for the players, well they’re effectively on the naughty step. Following defeat at bottom club Newcastle last Saturday they had their fortunes read to them by their boss.

That has not happened before. They were instructed to provide written feedback as to what went wrong and what each of them can do to put it right.

For all that their Farleigh House training base is the envy of the sport and their squad is packed with talent, Bath have few bragging rights on the park.

They were six-time English champions between 1989 and 1996 and won the RFU knock-out cup, as it was then known, 10 times from 1984 to 1996.

Since then? Nothing on the domestic front. 

Granted, they did win the 1998 European Cup and the 2008 European Challenge Cup, but that is not much to show for 20 years of professional rugby.

To suggest that Bath are a club in crisis is to overdo it. But only just.

Take away their early-season win at struggling London Irish and you have to go back to Exeter on the opening weekend for their only decent result in the Premiership.

And given their fixture list this month - European Cup-ties against Toulon home and away, and Leinster, plus a league visit to unbeaten leaders Saracens - it is not hard to make a case for them failing to win again before February at the earliest.

There are obvious parallels here with Chelsea Football Club and the riches-to-rags season that they are enduring.

“That’s a classic example of a team losing momentum,” Ford said of Guus Hiddink’s Blues.

“From last year when they won the Premier League to where they are at the moment. But that’s sport.

“We are not playing well enough and our fundamentals are not good enough, no matter how well we think we attacked last year.

“Our scrum was awesome last year and it has been good at times this year, Leinster at home in particular.

“But it has not been good enough consistently.

“We just need a bit more composure, better execution and all those things will turn into better belief and momentum.

“Sport is about momentum and at the moment we haven’t got it.”

And so to Sunday and the Cote d’Azur where Bath face Toulon, European champions for the past three seasons, in a Champions Cup clash rearranged due to the Paris atrocities.

Few will give Bath a chance, but nor did they at Toulouse in the same round a year ago.

Bath did not just win that day, the 35-18 beating they gave the French giants set them up for the most magnificent second half of the season. 

What the West Country club would give for something similar this weekend.

Champions Cup betting