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.