fevnut's blog: Easter weekend (Toronto & Rochdale)

Matches 9&10: Toronto (Home) and Rochdale (Away) both Championship

fevnut's musings

The Glorious Easter Weekend

It used to be (prior to 1996) that Easter Weekend saw what was actually or almost the culmination of the league season. Now that we play the summer seasons it has taken on a different meaning but one that fills us with anticipation nonetheless. For the two games over the weekend gives us a real sense of how the season is panning out. Before then the tables are comparatively meaningless but once Easter is over we get a much clearer picture of how things are turning out.

In the Championship London, Toulouse, Toronto and our beloved Fev would appear to be pulling clear BUT there can be little doubt that should Leigh get their act together they could still become a 5th challenger for the top 4. Last weekend’s 36-0 win against Dewsbury suggests that they may have started to make progress.

The weekend brings us some mightily significant ties. Fev at home to Toronto and London at home to Toulouse on Friday to be followed by Leigh at home to London and Toulouse at home to Toronto on Monday. We wish we could see all those games as well, of course, as our away match at Rochdale on Monday. It seems to us that those matches provide more significance than the so called ‘derby’ games in Super League on Friday.

The Moaners

Easter is also the traditional time of year for coaches (particularly Super League ones) to start their moaning about fixture overload. It’s pathetic really. Surely, well paid full-time players should be able to manage two games in four days. It’s nothing like what used to happen around Easter time when there was often a huge backlog of matches that had been postponed during the worst of the winters that had to be played in order to complete the league competitions before the Championship play-offs or Premiership Trophy were due to begin. We had a look back at the programme undergone by Fev players around Easter in some seasons. 1946/47 was a particularly bad winter. Rovers played Hunslet on February 1st and then, in the next six weeks only played two games. The consequence was an astonishing run of 4 matches in 5 days in early April. Don’t forget those players were part-time and had full-time jobs as well. These were those matches:

Fri Apr 04	Bramley	Home	17-3	W
Sat Apr 05	Hull	Away	8-18	L
Mon Apr 07	Leigh	Away	7-4	W
Tue Apr 08	Hull Kingston Rovers	Home	14-0	W

As we said, it happened quite often. Another example, and there were many to choose from came after another bad winter in 1962/63. Just take a look at this. The schedule for the last 16 games of that season!

Sat Apr 06	Hull	Away	9-12	L
Mon Apr 08	Widnes	Away	11-11	D
Fri Apr 12	Leeds	Away	5-6	L
Sat Apr 13	Huddersfield	Away	12-6	W
Mon Apr 15	Leeds	Home	10-5	W
Sat Apr 20	Saint Helens	Away	5-18	L
Wed Apr 24	Workington Town	Home	15-15	D
Sat Apr 27	Halifax	Home	12-33	L
Mon Apr 29	Hull Kingston Rovers	Home	8-0	W
Sat May 04	Swinton	Home	10-11	L
Wed May 08	Widnes	Home	7-23	L
Wed May 15	Oldham	Home	30-8	W
Sat May 18	Hull	Home	24-14	W
Wed May 22	Workington Town	Away	5-30	L
Sat May 25	Huddersfield	Home	0-5	L
Wed May 29	Halifax	Away	17-7	W

Thank you to FreeSports TV

It was great that we were able to watch record and then watch their televised match from the Championship last weekend. They are currently showing all Toronto’s games. But this was particularly opportune because it was against Rochdale and thus we were able to see both our Easter opponents in action. What did we learn? First of all, that Toronto can have an off-day, but we should be wary because an off-day like that is often followed by getting it together next time. Secondly, we MUST NOT take Rochdale lightly. Their defence was really good and they put together some excellent attacking moves. They were really unlucky to end up losing to a late penalty that made the score 18-17 to Toronto.