Bath 15 Gloucester 13 match report: Bath nearly blow victory as Freddie Burns puts George Ford in his place

Bath’s Peter Stringer gets the ball away from a scrum last night (Getty Images)

A wet night on the banks of the Avon, a weak Gloucester tight-forward unit bordering on the feeble, a referee who would show no mercy to a side engaging reverse gear at the scrum – it looked tailor-made for Bath. They duly won, but only just. Freddie Burns, the visitors' international outside-half, comprehensively outplayed the young pretender George Ford and very nearly turned form on its head.

If Stuart Lancaster, the England coach, was keeping an educated eye on those members of his squad involved in the proceedings, he would have been interested, if not particularly amused, to see all four of them involved in a brief "seconds out, round one" incident early in the contest. Matt Kvesic, open-side understudy to the national captain Chris Robshaw, hit Ford marginally late, after which the rival midfielders Burns and Kyle Eastmond exchanged pleasantries, aided and abetted by the lock Dave Attwood.

It quickly became clear that Gloucester, a side of all the talents outside the scrum, would once again fail to make sense of life at the sharp end. Time and again, the Bath forwards squeezed them at the set-piece, and Ford duly kicked a penalty as a result, to go with the one awarded against Kvesic in the opening exchanges. The outside-half would add a third before the break after Darren Dawidiuk's maul infringement, but this one was cancelled out by Burns.

Of the two outside-halves, Ford should, theoretically, have had the easier time of it because his pack put him on the front foot, but his kicking, out of hand as well as off the tee, was a long way short of perfect. Burns, meanwhile, had to make do and mend behind his struggling forwards. That he gave his rival such a thorough seeing-to spoke volumes for his application.

He looked even better when Ford, rapidly disintegrating despite landing a fourth penalty shortly after the interval, shaped up for a clearance kick inside his 22. Burns minimised his opposite number's space, made the chargedown, found top gear immediately and with his flypaper hands as reliable as ever, claimed a try out of the blue. His conversion reduced the deficit to two points and there was a real possibility of an upset.

But Gloucester's inadequacies at close quarters continued to cost them. Ford grabbed another three points from the tee and although Burns matched him like for like, it was not quite enough.

Bath A Watson; S Rokoduguni, J Joseph, K Eastmond (G Henson 67), M Banahan; G Ford, P Stringer; P James (N Catt 70), R Webber (R Batty 70), A Perenise (J P Orlandi 62), S Hooper (capt), D Attwood, M Garvey, F Louw, C Fearns.

Gloucester R Cook; J May, M Tindall, R Mills, J Simpson-Daniel; F Burns, J Cowan (D Robson 55); D Murphy (Y Thomas 28), D Dawidiuk (H Edmonds 51), R Harden (J Gibbons 65), E Stooke, J Hudson (W James 51), T Savage (capt. A Qera 65), M Kvesic (Gibbons 58-65), S Kalamafoni (G Evans 65).

Referee W Barnes (London).