Mike Ford will be in charge at Bath next season after the club’s worst Premiership campaign in a decade but he accepts that if there is a repeat of the failure to challenge for a top-four place he will be looking for a new job.

Bath, last season’s Premiership finalists, are ninth in the table and the last time they finished that low was in 2005‑06. They are 13 points behind Harlequins in sixth position but if Quins win the European Challenge Cup, seventh would be enough to secure a Champions Cup spot. Sale occupy that position, Bath’s opponents away and home in the next two weekends.

“It has been hard this season,” the Bath coach said, “similar to one I had 10 years ago with Saracens when we finished ninth. I was not ready for the job then, but after what Bath achieved in the previous two years there was, quite rightly, a huge expectation and we have not delivered.

“I keep answering the same questions every week about what has gone wrong. It is not a nice place to be but you learn a lot. We are not going to win the Premiership this year but nor are 10 other teams. It is a tough competition but I believe we have the foundations in place along with an unbelievably talented, young side that will be reinforced with some good acquisitions next season. And we will have better preparation because there is no World Cup. We are confident we will be among the best again next season.”

Bath’s owner, Bruce Craig, has invested millions of pounds, establishing a state-of-the-art training facility just outside the city as well as strengthening the squad. He met Ford this week to discuss the campaign and gave the coach his support.

“I speak to Bruce every week,” Ford said. “He does not want to isolate me and not help but be the best he can as an owner, coming up with solutions to help the team win. We all want the same thing here and he understands the challenges. This season we had the World Cup on top of the Six Nations and at one point were down to our sixth-choice outside-half. They are facts, not excuses, but he is still disappointed we are not doing better.

“That’s fair enough. We will look at everything and rip things up if we need to. Maybe I should have done that last year when we were doing well, and it is all about how we can get better. If Bruce is not happy with me, he will tell me. You want that honesty. I am old and ugly enough to know what will happen if we carry on losing next year after a pre-season with all the squad, and good players coming in. I am not stupid but there is no way I expect us to be in that position next year.”

Bath not only had to contend with disappointed England World Cup players at the start of the season but also the loss of Sam Burgess, who after coming on as a replacement during the first game against Exeter returned to rugby league having been at the club for less than a year. The former England coach Stuart Lancaster said this week that if he had thought Burgess would have ended his union career after the World Cup, he would not have picked him.

“I do not know if Sam would have stayed with us had England done better,” Ford said. “You will have to ask him why he went back. It did not help us because we did a lot of our planning around him but he has moved on and so have we. The key after this season is to be humble and learn, saying we got it wrong and come back better. You go through ups and downs in your career and you learn more in defeat than victory.”

The Bath captain, Stuart Hooper, believes stability at the top is essential if Bath are to bounce back. “It is not seen regularly in professional sport, along with continuity, but the evidence is there to say that it does help,” he said. “You do not want a huge amount of turnover of players or management. We are not much different to the team that competed in the final a year ago and we need to make sure what we are doing as a group is right before looking elsewhere. The Premiership is an incredibly tough competition now and there is no margin for error.”