CONTROVERSIAL referee JP Doyle is making his first appearance at Sixways since he was berated for failing to award a last-gasp penalty-try in February.

Warriors’ director of rugby Dean Ryan was incensed after Bath’s Ross Batty denied Gerrit-Jan van Velze a match-winning try when he appeared to deliberately knock the ball on.

Replays showed Batty had blocked Cooper Vuna's pass to the onrushing van Velze and Warriors lost the match 16-14.

After the defeat, Ryan claimed Doyle should have awarded a penalty try and said the incident was among a number of “poor refereeing” decisions Warriors had received in the Aviva Premiership.

Doyle is likely to receive a warm welcome from Warriors fans and will be in charge of his 112th Premiership game.

Warriors were humbled 50-12 at Exeter Chiefs in their last outing and Ryan is hoping for a stronger showing against Wasps tomorrow (3pm).

“There is no secret about it - we just didn’t have anything left when we got to Exeter,” said Ryan.

“That has changed so we will probably get a better reflection of how close we are to one of these big sides.

“I don’t think the Exeter match was necessarily a true reflection of how we’d been all year.

“We have to see if we can put that right against similar opposition.

“We saw how close Exeter and Wasps were last weekend with similar styles of play so we have got to see how close we can get to them.”

Warriors’ defeat at Sandy Park ended their club-record four-game Premiership winning run.

They have not won four successive top-tier matches at Sixways since December 2012.

After tackling Wasps, Warriors travel to Leicester Tigers before ending their campaign at home to Saracens.

“We needed to recharge the batteries after a block of 10 matches and it was unrealistic to think we could just keep going round and round,” said Ryan.

“We always said this season was never about relegation, it was about challenging whether we could get the pace of this league and whether we could challenge the best.

“There has only been two or three times when we’ve fallen short.

“We don’t want that number to increase just because it’s coming to the end of the season.

“We want to continue to see how close we can get to the best sides in this country and they are coming in the next three matches.”

Warriors were stung in the closing minutes in their first meeting with Wasps at the Ricoh Arena in January.

Warriors lost 32-22 after leading the match for 78 minutes.

 “I think we would all have liked that game to have been transferred into a win," said Ryan,

"Wasps have grown and we have grown and it’s a different contest now for different reasons.

"We were desperate for a win then and we didn’t get it so it was huge disappointment.

"Wasps were probably struggling for form a little bit across that window but they are certainly not struggling for form now.

"It’s going to be a huge challenge for us just to see where we are."