WHAT a difference a season makes. Throughout the last Aviva Premiership campaign, Worcester were almost always a dour side to watch.

If you went to a Warriors game, you knew the best you could hope for was a dogged victory where the opposition were forced into making more mistakes than Worcester.

Tries were a rarity and the sole vision for that campaign was survival — Richard Hill’s mission was to secure top-flight status at all costs.

After leading Worcester out of the Championship at the first time of asking, Hill always insisted it was a case of rebuilding the club one step at a time.

Step one was creating a rock solid defence which could repel enough sides to help Warriors avoid an immediate return to tier two and former England defence guru Phil Larder played a major role in ensuring Worcester’s try line became very difficult to breach.

Defensive fortitude came at a price though and that was a clear lack of any semblance of an attacking game plan.

Hill recognised this as a necessary evil and, as soon as Warriors had secured their place at the top table, the Sixways head coach set about revamping and expanding his coaching team in a bid to develop a ruthless, try-scoring cutting edge.

Mathieu Rourre, the Biarritz academy boss, was recruited on a part-time basis to help develop the attacking arsenal into a unit capable of breaching even the most resolute of Premiership defences.

Look at the statistics, they don’t lie. Although the 2012-13 campaign is still in its embryonic stages, there are marked improvements on the previous term.

After five games of Worcester’s return to the top-flight, they had tackled Sale, Harlequins and Northampton at home as well as making trips to Gloucester and Saracens. Admittedly, Worcester did manage two wins and a losing bonus point from those games but, tellingly, they only crept over the line on two occasions.

This year, however, Worcester have had a similar start to the season in terms of difficulty with away matches at Leicester and Saints, as well as visits from Bath, Gloucester and London Irish.

The first win of the season didn’t come until last Friday when the Exiles were thrashed 35-11, but bad luck and poor refereeing have played a part in that.

The most pertinent stat, though, is that Warriors have crossed the whitewash 12 times already this term.

Justification, if ever it was needed, that Hill and his Warriors are moving in the right direction.