First the positive, for half an hour of this match it was difficult to tell which side had taken more than £1 million to build and which had been put together on the mid-season hoof.

The negative? That says more about the paucity of London Welsh than it does about the progress of Bees.

The Exiles’ first couple of seasons of full time rugby have seen them take the Cornish Pirates route to mid-table mediocrity in becoming a team whose raison d’etre is wasting money on under-achievers.

A kind of Resting Place for the Ordinary, if you will.

How a professional back line can show so little commitment in defence and lack so much enterprise in attack is a study in futility and does their coaches no credit at all.

Thankfully the visitors’ forwards were on their game, for the remaining 50 minutes at least, and that was enough to put sufficient distance between themselves and their hosts to escape Sharmans Cross Road without losing a point.

Yet Bees must cling on to a first half showing when they were the equal of Welsh and produced one flowing threequarter counter attack that evoked memories of happier days.

If only it had produced a try.

In some ways it did, for Welsh, as Simon Whatling pounced on a loose pass and put Jon Fisher away.

It was a 14 point turnaround that in the context of this match and the wounds that have been inflicted on Bees recently, was always going to be too much to overcome.

Yet that is where we are with Bees at present.

For all their undoubted development in the pack and lineout, they remain as weak as purified water behind the scrum and utterly fallible in it.

Problems in the front row saw the concession of a penalty try and a string of infringements that made victory virtually impossible.

They desperately need specialised input at scrum time, not to mention the sort of tighthead who’d eat his mother rather than loose his own put in.

And in the backs they possess neither the broadsword at inside centre nor the rapier at outside.

Simon Hunt and Mitch Culpin should be good enough out wide but like so many Championship teams, Bees have stopped asking questions of their opponents and are therefore wasting their most potent weapons.

Instead they hoof whatever possession they can get into the skies and hope for a lucky break thereby betraying their recruitment policy for the last 18 months.

It is especially disappointing when they enter a match vowing to take something from every visit to the Welsh 22.

It is a way to keep those matches tight but not the way to win many.

Nevertheless they cling to the fact they need to win only two and as they inch forward week-by-week that remains a possibility.

As they wait for the moment when Coventry’s problems exceed their own, it is also one that might pay off.

BEES: Mitchell; Hunt, McLean, Lawson, Culpin; Petty (Binham, 76), J Williams (Brown, 45); Long, Philpott, Reid, Davidson, Noonan (Halavatau, 60), Cox, Bell, Clayton. Replacements: Dowding, G Thomas, Gardner, Tomlinson.

WELSH: Lewis-Pratt (Ross, 53); Sampson (Brown, 77), Starling (Mackey, 64), Whatling, Claassens; A Thomas, Stevenson (Runciman, 53); Holford, Buckland (Mercer, 78), Ward (D Williams, 74), Garvey, Corker (Powell, 66), Fisher, Mercer (Whitehead, 67), Mills.

Referee: Chris Sharp