The Fev Families

There has been a thread on the Featherstone Rovers Heritage Society listing a few Fathers and Sons who have both played for Fev.

That inspired fevnut to do some research and as a result we have listed below, Fathers and Sons, Grandfathers and Grandsons, Uncles and Nephews, Brothers and Cousins.

The list is definitely not complete and if you know of any others please comment below. It is particularly difficult where the link is through the mother when the players will have different surnames!

The dates we have listed are the years when each player played their first and last games for Fev.

A fevnut Special: Fev's BAME players

 

A few days ago a thread started on the Featherstone Rovers Fans Facebook page about 'black players' who have played for Featherstone.

Although no-one would claim that Rugby League is perfect in this regard it is certainly true that we have been way, way ahead of other sports. 

The sport has a rich legacy of black Welsh players, predominantly from the Tiger Bay area. It has always been portrayed that these players 'came north' for the money but that is by no means the full story. Many came because of the racism in rugby union which meant that they had no chance of playing at international level or even for the top Welsh rugby union club sides.

The foul nature of racism in sport is illustrated by the rep honours for one of the Fev players. Before he came to England, played in a rugby union team named the 'South African Coloureds'. Even if he had been the best player in the world he would have been excluded from the official national Springboks team. He later became the first player born in South Africa to play for the Great Britain rugby league team.

Indeed, rugby league in this country was the first sport to include black players in the national team, the first sport to have a black player captaining the national team and the first sport to have a black head coach for the national team.

So, as we head into our centenary, we wanted to celebrate the ethnic diversity of those who have worn the iconic shirt of Featherstone Rovers. We thought that we would try to compile a list of the 'black players' who have played for Rovers. But very quickly we realised that the category 'black' was both misleading and itself excluding the rich diversity in both rugby league in general and Fev in particular.

So we adopted the 'BAME' classification, BAME standing for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnicity. In other words, including all who are not of the Caucasian race, the majority ethnicity in the UK.

Included in our list are players of African and Asian descent, of indigenous New Zealand (Maori) descent, indigenous Australian descent, and people of South Sea Island descent (including Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa and Tonga). The category would also include those of the Semitic race (like fevnut!) but we are not currently aware of any to have played for Featherstone. Many people are unaware that the Semitic race includes not only Jews but also Arabs.

The first attempt to produce a list was posted on facebook and attracted some helpful posts about names we had omitted. We will be grateful for any further indication of names we might have missed.

People have asked who was the first to play for Featherstone and it does seem to be Francis Jarvis in 1978.

Fev Through the Ages: Second Rows

Here are the 10 Fev players who have made the most appearances at Second Row. 

Funny how the memory plays tricks. My memories of Peter Smith are as a brilliant ball handling loose forward. I was surprised to find that he made far more appearances in the second row!

Please note that the 'Fev Years' column' refers to the first and last years that the player appeared in this position.

For Rugby League statisticians it always causes difficulties when two players have the same name. None more so than the name Chris Smith. We have four of those in our records and that is just the records of players in the summer era!

Through time there are a number of repeat names in our Featherstone database. George Johnson, Tommy Smales and Joe Evans are just three of those.

Do you know the significance of these matches?

In those 18 matches Fev took to the field with a second row pairing of Gary Price and Gary Price! A commentator's nightmare! They were known as Gary H and Gary S. Gary H because his middle name is Howard and Gary S because his nickname was Slugger.

There were, of course, other matches when they were on the field at the same time but the list above is when they started together in the second row.

Featherstone Players in Other Representative Teams

Having recently produced a page with all the Fev players who have played in international teams we have now turned our attention to all the other representative teams. They are divided into three sections

• County Teams
• Age Group Teams
• Other Teams

If a player is shown in a white font on a navy backgound that indicates that he played for the team whilst he was a Featherstone Rovers player.

COUNTY TEAMS

AGE GROUP TEAMS

OTHER TEAMS

The 'Other Nationalities' section includes those who have played in teams appearing under the title of Other Nationalities. Ben Gronow played for Other Nationalities against England in 1921. John Daly and Robert Jarvis played for Other Nationalities in the European Nations Championship. This competition ran from the 1949-50 to 1955-56 seasons and was competed for by England, France, Wales and Other Nationalities. David Barends and Harold Box played in the Oher Nationalities team which competed in the County Championship competition involving Cumbria, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Other Nationalities during the 1974-75 and 1975-76 seasons. There were also matches between England and the 'Exiles' in the 2011, 2012 and 2013 seasons but no Fev player was ever included in these teams.

fevnut's musings: Fev won the cup and two very good signings

 

Fev won the Cup (in 2020)!?!

What a shame it is that so many people forget or choose to ignore the huge contribution that our little town and big club make to Rugby League!

The 2020 Challenge Cup Final was a pertinent illustration of this.

So let’s go through and mark the links.

Leeds scored three tries, two from Ash Handley, one from Tom Briscoe. Through dual registration, Featherstone played an important part in the development of Ash Handley and, although he never played for Fev, Tom Briscoe is a Featherstone lad who started his rugby league journey at Featherstone Lions.

What we wrote above about Ash Handley also applies to several other members of the winning team: Mikolaj Oledzki, Brad Dwyer, Alex Sutcliffe and to a lesser extent Liam Sutcliffe (who just played the one game on dual registration for Fev this year helping him get back to fitness. The Fev connection even extends to their water carriers, Luke Briscoe and Cameron Smith.

Leeds victory was the first time that the Challenge Cup had been won by a coach whose father had also achieved that feat. And what a magnificent job Richard Agar has done since he took over (initially as caretaker coach) at Leeds last year in very difficult circumstances. Father and son, both local and both played for Fev!

 

Finally, of course there is also the Leeds assistant coach who is, of course, none other than James Webster, the Featherstone head coach.

It's hard to think of another Challenge Cup winning side that had greater links to another club.

There are also links with Salford but very different ones. They have benefitted by having Connor Jones this year which almost certainly wouldn’t have happened without Fev bringing him over from Australia in 2019.  Also, there was a Salford player in their final team who is leaving them for the greater glory of playing for Fev next year!

The point we are trying to make is that, despite the fact that most Super League clubs and Sky television seem to believe that Super League is the be-all and end-all of rugby league, the game would simply collapse without the Championship, League One and community clubs.

 

Two very good signings

Regular readers of fevnut’s musings might recall that earlier this year (pre-covid) we wrote expressing our concern over the lack of cover in the vital hooker position leaving player’s who are not dummy-half specialists to fill in. The skills required at dummy-half are very specific and make it very difficult for players who are not specialists to be successful at hooker.

In 2019 we were blessed by having the wonderful Cameron King and then Connor Jones joined us and so we had two outstanding hookers. It was very sad when Cameron decided that he had to return home to Australia and Connor was signed by Salford. To lose one would have been unfortunate but to lose both was a big blow.

So, we were absolutely delighted when the announcement came that Connor was coming back to Fev in 2021. He didn’t get into a regular playing spot with Salford (more fool them). And it’s not the first time that a Fev player has been enticed over the pennines to Salford to find themselves on the periphery and as a result coming back to us.

Not so long ago (2005) Stuart Dickens became a Salford player, got very few games and returned to Fev towards the end of the season, and played a further 209 games before his retirement at the end of 2012 bring his total Fev appearances to 421. Wouldn’t it be great if Connor Jones were to stay at Fev long enough to bring his appearances up to 100!

 

The second bit of signing news which brought us real pleasure was that of Kris Welham, a player we have admired for many years. Very rarely does he do anything spectacular but he’s solid, really solid, has great defensive qualities and reads the game very well. We feel pretty confident that he will not only enhance the team with his own performances but his experience and knowledge will be very valuable to the younger members of our squad.

 

 

Fev Colours

You may notice that this year we have introduced ‘chocolate’ into our colour scheme on the blog. That’s because this is our centenary season and Fev’s colours when we started in the professional game were chocolate and white, the move to navy and white came later. We believe that Fev changed from the chocolate and white sometime in the 1930s but the first change was to more of a royal blue and then later onto our famous navy and white butcher’s stripe hoops.

Featherstone's League of Nations Part 2

In part one of our blog about 'Feathestone's League of Nations' we asked who was the first Fev player to achieve international honours. It was Jack Hirst in 1923 playing for England against Wales at Huddersfield on October 1st.

The listings below include all the the Fev players who have played for international teams, although not necessarily while they were at Fev. 

Those shown in a white font on navy background achieved their international appearances while they were a registered Featherstone player.

There are two players in the list who have not yet played for Fev but have been announced as members of our 2021 squad.

HOME NATIONS

n.b. Ian Smales was a member of the Great Britain 1990 touring party. He played in several tour matches but not Test Matches.

OTHER NATIONS

We have included Hitro Okesene under Samoa but it is actually a bit more complicated than that. In 1988 he played for Western Samoa which changed its name to Samoa in 1997. In 1992 he played for American Samoa (five islands that are an unincorporated territory of the United States). He was actually born in New Zealand.

Featherstone's League of Nations

 

Each year fevnut designs a graphic for the fevnut’s musings page of our blog. On it we place the flags that can be associated with the current Fev squad. We’ve been working on the graphic for 2021 and here is the flag section.

Can you name the players who can be associated with each flag other than the Yorkshire and England flags that apply to most of the team?

Whilst on this subject we also went through the list of national teams that have included players who have played for Fev (although not necessarily while they were at Fev). This list includes players in the 2021 squad who have not yet played for Fev.

 

Can you name at least one Fev player from each of the nationalities?

And the final question for you to ponder: Who was the first Fev player to achieve international honours?

After you have had time to think about it, we will publish the full list of the Fev players who have played for national teams.

 

Funnily enough, in a nearby supermarket a couple of weeks ago, we bumped into the player who appeared for the United States. We have always been puzzled by his qualification for doing that and asked him about it and he revealed that he had absolutely no qualification that enabled him to play for them. However, it wasn’t an international match, the game being against Cumbria.

Fev through the Ages: Hookers

 

Here are the 10 Fev players who have made the most appearances at Hooker. 

Please note that the 'Fev Years' column' refers to the first and last years that the player appeared in this position.

Fev players who started in all the pack positions

A few days ago fevnut was scrolling through the records of some of our favourite Fev players when we noticed that Vince Farrar had started games in all the possible pack positions (Prop, Hooker, Second Row and Loose Forward). We suspected that was rather unusual because hooker is such a specialist position. No surprise that a player should play in all the other three positions but we suspected that to play in all four would be quite rare.

So it was over to the database to see if there were any others and we were quite surprised to find 25 different players who had done that (including two of the current squad).

The two current squad members in the list are John Davies and Jack Bussey. John Davies has also started at centre (against Leigh in 2019), but then there are plenty of forwards who have occasionally filled in at centre. What is far more unusual is that Jack-of-all-trades Bussey has also started six times at stand-off. Many players have played at hooker and stand-off but prop and stand-off must be a pretty rare combination!

Here is the full list.

Fev through the Ages: Props

Here are the 10 Fev players who have made the most appearances at Prop. 

Please note that the 'Fev Years' column' refers to the first and last years that the player appeared in this position.

And at the top of the list is our Heritage Number 1 who played in Fev's first ever professional game. Hard to imagine anyone ever breaking his record of 419 appearances at prop which is the highest number for any player in any position!