Harlequins boss Paul Gustard says that his side need to put in the hard yards after they fell to a 19-12 defeat away at Bath.

Tries from Alex Dombrandt and Marcus Smith saw Gustard’s side pick up a bonus point but the result means that Quins have only picked up only one victory in their last five Gallagher Premiership Rugby outings.

Smith’s conversion managed to put Harlequins in front but a Ruaridh MCconnochie try and Freddie Burns' penalty sealed the result for Bath late in the second half.

Gustard said: “It is disappointing for us; we didn’t do the thing we spoke about at half-time. We spoke about managing the field a bit better. We didn’t do that.”

“You saw international fly-halves in [Rhys] Preistland and [Freddie] Burns starting to turn us a little bit and find space. When we turned, we found bodies.

“We defended for about 60-70% of the game today, so we were inside our half a lot.

“Defence mostly was pretty good, but we didn’t challenge them enough with our attacks today and we made too many errors and our kicking wasn’t up to scratch.”

Harlequins had huge names missing for the tie through injuries and as a result had to reply on a number of academy graduates to make up the numbers. 

“It has been a tough year with injuries, we have got 25 guys out injured in our senior squad and it is a challenge,” Gustard continued.

“We come down to Bath, which pretty much have their first team, bar the two or three internationals they have playing, and we give them a bit of a scare which is good because we get a bonus point and we needed to get that.

“The downside is that we don’t come to lose anywhere we play.”

Harlequins host league leaders Exeter next and Gustard believes the challenge is an opportunity to turn their season around.

“The next game is the most important game,” Gustard added.

 “We will look back at this game and there might be two or three things we need to fix and we will get that right for Exeter.

“We have had three big humdingers against Exeter in the past few seasons, but we need to get a positive result.

“We are going to work hard to get through this difficult period.

“We have been playing okay, London Irish was closer than the score line suggests and today was close as you saw but we need to start getting some W’s now because we still have aspirations to do something special this year.”