After four weeks stuck on the sidelines, Moseley skipper Neil Mason must have been counting down the days ahead of his return.

Injured players rarely make good spectators but when you are a player of Mason's ilk - an all-action forward constantly in the thick of things - those days in the stand must have seemed an eternity.

So with his troublesome knee back in working order, the former Worcester flanker led his side out in front of more than 2,200 fans at Goldington Road.

Eighty minutes later and the scoreboard said it all. A 62-17 defeat and what should have been a day to cherish had become one to forget for Mason.

"It wasn't a good game for us," he admitted. "We need to go to training on Tuesday and put this result behind us.

"There's no point dwelling on it, we need to go back to the drawing board, grind out and sort out the problems.

"We need to get back to square one and evaluate where we go from there.

"We will come back stronger next week because of this experience, I'm sure of that. We played well in the first half but in the second half we tried for four tries and were playing too much rugby in the wrong places and made some wrong decisions.

"I don't think it's a major problem for us, we can come back from this. We've done it before and we'll do it again.

"It was close at half time but it was in the second half when we started to make the wrong choices."

The pace of the game never let up with 12 tries being scored, ten by the home side.

It was Moseley who registered first through a Greg MacDonald penalty on five minutes before Bedford scrum half Karl Dickson bagged the first of a hat-trick of tries five minutes later.

Full of confidence from last week's heroic display against Doncaster, Moseley hit back and winger Dan Norton responded in style when he ran in on the overlap, MacDonald's conversion edging the visitors into a 10-7 lead with only 12 minutes on the clock.

Another converted Dickson try swung the game back to the Blues and although Canadian full back James Pritchard was then sin-binned for punching prop Terry Sigley, Bedford scored a third try through centre Liam Roberts.

But Moseley were proving tough to crack and a well-worked try from scrum half Jimmy Ireland, converted by MacDonald, edged them to within four points.

But crack they did, helped by a brace of injury-time tries from forwards Dan Richardson and Nic Strauss, while Moseley lock Richard Stott found himself sitting out the start of the second half after picking up a yellow card.

The second period was one-way traffic with Alex Page, Tom Youngs and Roberts going over for Bedford before the tenacious Dickson completed his treble.

Norton did have a chance to chalk up a score for the visitors but failed to find a way past the lumbering Craig Moir as he attempted to race on to his clever kick ahead.

Replacement Jon Elrick bagged Bedford's tenth and final try leaving Mason and head coach Ian Smith to attempt to lift their side ahead of Saturday's clash with Plymouth Albion.