The six weeks and 750 miles that separated Bevon Armitage’s two most recent rugby matches barely begin to tell a story of breath-taking incongruity.

The last – and first for Moseley – came at a frozen Memorial Stadium on Sunday in a 36-25 defeat that leaves the centre and his new team-mates anchored in the Championship relegation play-offs.

His was an impressive debut. He was resolute in defence and direct in attack, in short everything Moseley have lacked in a single outside centre for the last 18 months.

Perhaps his finest contribution came after half-an-hour when he hurtled towards opposite number Jack Adams, stripped the ball from him and then popped up a few phases later to power over the gain-line and win his side a penalty.

Not since Adams himself wore the Red and Black have Mose supporters seen anything quite as spectacularly proactive from their No.13 making it a display rich in promise.

Indeed it is only made more admirable by the fact it was Armitage’s first game since October 16, when he was part of a Nice side that clung on to a 9-9 draw against Chateaurenard.

Swap the frozen Memorial pitch, with ice crystals that cut knees to shreds and sub-zero temperatures that froze bones to the very marrow, for a balmy riverside Mediterranean evening where the mercury hovers benignly at 20C.

It might sound like a no-brainer for most, who would argue the French Riviera is slightly more alluring in December than Billesley Common, but Armitage is more than happy to have made the opposite journey – even if it meant shivering throughout a five-minute pitch-side interview to explain his vision of the future.

“I can’t even remember my last game,” he said. “It’s been about a month I haven’t played and it was hard to catch my breath.

“I thought in the first half I was off the pace. Once I caught my second wind I thought I went okay but there is definitely more to come.”

Let’s hopes so for Moseley’s sake because Armitage’s arrival is a massive shot in the arm. His presence allows the clever Anthony Carter to return to his eyrie at full back, from where he can identify and hopefully capitalise on the gaps Armitage’s power opens up.

Almost straight away Ian Smith’s side appears more solid out wide, in the positions where four opposition wingers have bagged hat-tricks this season.

Unfortunately for Smith the 28-year-old cannot get the threequarter line moving on his own and while no-one got outside them at Bristol, plenty came through the middle.

Indeed 19-year-old Jack Tovey’s decisive try, which pulled Bristol clear, came as he glided past five defenders as though they had little more substance than your average ghost.

“We left at least a couple of points out there,” the former Doncaster man said of his Moseley bow. “In the first half we were still asleep and didn’t really come out the blocks.

“If you give a team like Bristol a start like that it’s hard to come back. You can’t give anyone in this league a lead like that and expect to come back – it’s a hard mountain to climb.

"The penalties were our own fault, we were ill-disciplined at the breakdown and Jarvis punished us. It was good to come back but still missed tackles cost us in the end.”

And it might end up costing them big because Bristol are now ten points clear of Moseley with just eight games left. With Bedford to play on Saturday and Worcester and London Welsh to visit, it is difficult to envisage that deficit reducing sufficiently.

Not that Armitage is giving up hope.

“I thought we played well in the second half, we could have taken at least a point out of the game if we just believed in ourselves a bit more.

“We believed we could come out and put in a performance and only in the second half it showed. We will go away, look at the DVD, see what went wrong, work on it and put it right for the next game.

“There might be a temptation for others to say Moseley are going to be bottom four but not for me. Not with the team and the potential we have got at the club. I can see us making top eight, it would be a big turnaround but we will work on it.”

For Armitage it is a relief to be concentrating his worries on the rugby field, rather than on the extraneous factors that blighted his time in Nice.

Dissatisfaction with his accommodation and other family related issues provoked him to leave the Federale 1 outfit just a few months after he joined from Doncaster, in what on the face of it appeared a dream move. His reality was very different and even when he returned to England at the start of November, he was still not free to resume his career.

A financial dispute prompted Nice to play hardball with his registration, which delayed his Moseley career by several weeks.

“The RFU lawyers got involved in the end and they sorted it out because he was not moving,” he said.

“It’s absolutely horrible, the boys have still not been paid out there, I am glad to be out of it now.

“It was tremendously frustrating. I wanted to make a start here but was kept out of the game for a month. I’ve been training during that time, just wanting to put it behind me and get on with rugby.”

He is now able to do just that – and not before time because if Moseley are to extricate themselves from the bottom four, they need all the help they can get.