Twenty minutes after time had elapsed, with Bath down to 11 men, Duncan Weir landed the conversion that has secured Worcester a vital edge in this insane relegation battle. Insanity is the word for this finish, Worcester overturning a 16-point half-time deficit at 5.12pm to put four points between them and Newcastle at the bottom of the table.

In the end, Bath faced one final scrum with three backs and a scrum-half in defence, allowing Bryce Heem to stroll in for his second try of the match. A red card for Ross Batty in the 64th minute had been followed by a yellow for each Bath prop during an extraordinarily tense series of scrums on Bath’s five-metre line long after time was up.

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Another for Aled Brew for offside, with umpteen backs outside him, put Bath in their impossible position. This was reminiscent of France-Wales in Paris a couple of seasons ago, although the probity of Bath was exemplary here, their starting front row replacing the replacement front row without so much as a whiff of a hamstring strain. If only their discipline had been so. The penalty count in the second half was 14-1 against.

It was the kind of agonising finish here that Worcester have so often been on the wrong side of in recent years, losing handsome leads right at the death, not least against Bath themselves. How energising it looks for that dynamic to be reversed.

“I’ve never seen a game end like that,” said Alan Solomons, the Worcester director of rugby. “It does a lot to boost the confidence of the players to be down by that much at half-time and know you can turn it around.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Worcester Warriors players celebrate after Duncan Weir’s late conversion. Photograph: Robbie Stephenson/JMP/Rex/Shutterstock

Worcester were a side transformed after the break but by then they were 16 points adrift, curiously unable to locate the zip that has characterised their better matches this season. It is not as if the stakes were low. Without exactly tearing them up, Bath had dominated the first half. Worcester were staring at a 9-0 deficit in short order. The penalty lottery is likely to hurt you if you spend most of the time in your own half.

Bath scored their only try a few minutes before the break. James Wilson was held up, missing the whitewash by a whisker in the tackle of Perry Humphreys, but Bath scored from the scrum. Zach Mercer had been the liveliest player on show, and he emerged with the game’s first try, after Jamie Roberts had battered close to the line. Battering more or less summed the game up at that point.

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A fourth Burns penalty left Worcester 19-3 adrift at the break. It was the last of Bath’s points. Weir’s penalty, after Francois Louw’s high tackle on Heem, edged the Warriors closer, which was their cue to find some form. Francois Venter was the game breaker. He cut Bath’s line on the right before doing it again, this time decisively, on the left. Chris Pennell’s short ball invited him to pick a great line, and Heem was on hand to score just shy of the hour.

Weir could not convert but Sixways was rocking now. All the more so five minutes later when Batty was shown his red. It was not exactly a tip tackle, more a neck roll in which he pulled Lewis down head first, a combination the referee felt, probably rightly, was worth a red.

Worcester set up in Bath’s 22 and when they coaxed the visitors offside, Weir landed his third to bring them back to within a score.

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Cue the madness of the match that would not end. Worcester had scrum after scrum, and soon the yellow cards began to flash. It was nothing if not a new way to win a game. They all count.