T'Other Side: Batley Bulldogs

 

2021 Shirt

FIRST TEAM SQUAD

LAST TIME OUT

Head Coach: Craig Lingard

This is Craig Lingard’s second season as head coach of Batley, having taken over in 2020 from Matt Diskin who moved to take over in charge of newly promoted Oldham. Craig has previously been head coach at Keighley from 2017 to May 2019 and he started his career at Bramley Buffaloes where he was head coach in 2012.

Although this will be only his 9th game as Batley coach he is far from being a stranger at Mount Pleasant! Before taking over as coach he was the head of Batley’s community team and his entire playing career (1998-2008), mostly as a fullback, was at Batley. In total he played 205 games and scored 142 tries which remains as Batley’s all-time career try scoring record. He was also for some time the assistant coach at Batley

He was so highly regarded that the terrace opposite the ground entrance was named ‘The Craig Lingard Terrace’.

Star Man: Tom Gilmore

Tom Gilmore made his professional début with his hometown club, Widnes Vikings, in 2012 and remained with them until the end of 2019. While there he also had loan spells with North Wales Crusaders (2014) and London Broncos (2015). In 2020 he signed for Halifax. With the Championship suspended, Salford took him on loan to play a couple of games.

He has played all his games at halfback and League Express named him as their Batley Man of the Match last week.

New Signings for 2021

The Fev connection

There is a long history of players who have played for both Batley and Fev.

There is also a Fev connection with the Batley coach, Craig Lingard, who is related to some former Fev players and Craig himself played for Travellers Saints as a youngster.

Nyle Flynn is the son of Adrian Flynn who played for Fev in 2003 and then for Batley in 2004 and 2005.

This week's referee

A referee who, in 2020, awarded more penalties and dispensed more cards than the average although, since his first Fev game in 2016 when he gave 24 penalties, he has never gone above 19. 

Fev players have received 5 yellow cards from him but (so far!) he has never sent anyone off in a Fev match.

fevnut's musings #03: Get out of Jail, Daryl Powell and a ghastly playing strip

 

Get Out of Jail Free Card

 

We have been really looking forward to watching the squad that James Webster, Steve Gill and Mark Campbell have put together for 2021. Quite frankly we never could have imagined a team so full of talented players would put together such an inept display as they did last week in the Challenge Cup against Batley.

 

Some people say ‘a win is a win’ and, yes, we are through to the next round of the Challenge Cup and also the semi-finals of the 1895 cup with the chance to watch Fev playing at Wembley.

 

But if we play like that again there are many Championship clubs that will take better advantage than Batley managed. We can’t even begin to imagine winning like that against Toulouse, York, London or Widnes or several other clubs and that would seriously jeopardise any ideas of winning the Championship.

 

The club have put out a highlights of the match on Rovers TV. If they had put out a lowlights it would have been much longer! But we were pleased to hear James Webster being so clear about how unacceptable the performance was and unlike many coaches, he didn’t make any excuses.

 

Let’s hope the players take advantage of the fact that we are playing Batley again on Friday to put on a first class performance and expunge the memory of last week.

 

 

What is it about Batley?

 

Our overall record against them is very good. We have now won the last nine matches and in league matches we have won 23 out of the last 24. Despite that we have had several shockers against them over the last few years.

 

In September 2016 we played them at their place in the Qualifiers and we should have won but were beaten 11-10 by a Dominic Brambani field goal having been ahead for most of the match. Earlier that same year we had gone to Batley in the 5^th round of the Challenge Cup and were soundly beaten 28-10 with one of the Batley tries being scored by a sub called James Harrison!

 

Then there was the play-off match against them at home in 2013. We had won the League Leaders Shield and Batley had finished 5^th. We were hot favourites to beat them and progress to the Grand Final but after 80 minutes it was 20-20 and they won with a field goal from George Flanagan in Golden Point extra time.

 

But there is the compensation of THAT MATCH in 2015 when Fev scored 22 points in the last six minutes to win by 28-26 thanks to a moment of madness from Shaun Ainscough. A match that will never be forgotten by the fans of both teams.

 

 

Daryl Powell

 

So, we have the news that Daryl Powell is moving on at the end of 2021 and fevnut is absolutely delighted.

 

We will be forever grateful for what he achieved as the Fev coach between 2009 and 2013. Fev had recently spent two years in National League Two and he transformed us into the top club in the Championship and provided us with a chance to watch really inspiring rugby from the Rovers team.

 

But, in moving to Castleford (which was bound to happen sooner or later) he left some Fev fans (fevnut included) with a dilemma. It became slightly difficult to have the rightful Fev fans attitude towards Cas when a Fev hero was in charge of them.

 

Thank goodness next year there will no longer be any equivocation whatsoever in our attitude towards the neighbours!

But come to think of it there is one residual problem. One of there star players is an ex-pupil of ours. A nice lad who always sat at the front and when I went to sort out someone at the back would regularly take the copy of League Express off my desk and start reading it. Who was to know, at that time, that he would one day receive the Man of Steel award! But we won't let that get in the way of our thoughts about them in black and amber.

 

 

Scoring the weekend (just for fun)

Despite what we have said about Daryl (above) for many years now fevnut has had a system of scoring the weekend matches to see how well it has gone. The score is out of 16 and goes thus:

 

Fev win: 10 points

Catalans win: 2 points

Cas lose: 2 points

Wigan lose: 2 points

 

In explanation, fevnut has a long-standing affinity with the Perpignan area and we definitely see Catalans as our favourite Super League team. Cas losing, well that’s obvious, and we have a strong dislike of Wigan caused pre-dominantly with the damage we see that Maurice Lindsay wreaked upon rugby league.

 

 

SHIRTS

Finally this week we want to express our horror at one club’s 2021 shirt. No one has ever called fevnut a Conservative, or indeed conservative, but we do treasure Fev and the rugby league’s heritage. The heritage of playing strips is particularly to be valued. Like many Fev fans I would much prefer us to play in the butcher’s stripe and would have liked our away strip in this centenary year to have been based on the chocolate and white shirt that Fev played in for the early years of the club when it joined the Northern Rugby League.

 

So which shirt is it that has produced the horrors. It is this monstrosity from Keighley.

 

It looks as if it ought to be worn by a superhero in a comic strip or on a kids toy and we find it abhorrent to send out rugby league players wearing such a thing!

Past Matches against Batley

There are just 8 clubs who we have played more than 160 games against and Batley are one of those. Our overall record against them is a good one, and it is even better in the summer era during which time we have won more than 75% of the games.

Fev have won the last 9 matches against Batley and as far as League matches are concerned we have won 23 of the last 24.

Fev v Batley: Challenge Cup Round 2

 

This week's referee

 

Well, there's no danger of the referee getting lost while finding his way to Post Office Road, and he won't need a SatNav either. Of the referees on the RFL's current panel there are just three who have taken charge of more than 20 Fev matches. One of those has done 21, another 24 and this will be the 61st time for Gareth Hewer!

We wonder how many miles he covers from his base in Whitehaven.

fevnut's musings #02: Feeling sad, New Year and Big Impressions

Feeling Sad

After opening our 2021 campaign with a highly convincing win against the Bulls, we ought to be feeling really happy. But we are not because we have received some very sad news. Every now and then along comes a player who stands out well above the usual affection we have for all Fev players. The sort of player who, for whatever reason, is one that we really love to watch. And it is not always the very greatest of players but one who just simply commands the attention and focus of a fan.

For us there have been several such who are not the most obvious ones. Players such as Charlie Stone, Danny Divet, Danny Baker and Deryck Fox. But fevnut’s greatest hero, the one who we always focussed on when he was playing and who it was always worth watching, even when he wasn’t directly involved in the play, was Jeff Grayshon. The news that he has just died is the reason why we feel so sad today.

 

We extend our condolences to his family and wish them top know that their Jeff gave the most amazing amount of pleasure to so many rugby league fans.

Jeff played exactly 100 games for Fev which is not in itself remarkable, but it certainly does become so when you bear in mind that he made his Rovers début at the age of 39!

As we understand it, the Featherstone committee at that time, decided that at the age of 42 Jeff was too old to have his contract extended. What a terrible decision that was. The consequence was that we lost two wonderful assets. First of all, of course, Jeff himself who went to Batley and played 104 matches for them before eventually retiring at the age of 45! But that committee decision was also a big factor in Peter Fox, surely our greatest coach, leaving. And what happened the following year? We got relegated.

 

 

New Year

Last year we wrote about how we view New Year’s Day as being the start of the new season. So much more important than January 1^st! But this year it feels so very strange. Who would ever have thought that Fev fans would have to watch the opening games at home on television. Thank you to the BBC and Fev TV for enabling us to do so but it really isn’t the same as getting together with our mates at Post Office Road or an away ground sharing the experience.

Nevertheless, it was a joy to watch the team beat Bradford so convincingly, and all the more so after our exit from the Challenge Cup when we were beaten by them in Golden Point Extra Time at Odsal in 2019 with a drop goal scored by Dane Chisholm.

 

Who has Impressed?

Basically, the entire squad.

In particular Frankie Halton looks a really good prospect, Connor Jones has looked sharp on his return and, in the Bradford game and the two ‘friendlies’ Dean Parata has been terrific with five tries in three games. For us his try against Bradford was the try of the match, with Craig Hall’s long range effort coming very close behind.

We seemed to be really blessed in the halfback/hooker positions. When all are fit, who on earth do you leave out from Fa’amanu Brown, Dean Chisholm, Tom Holmes, Connor Jones and Dean Parata?

We hope that Dale Ferguson recovers from his injury quickly because the combination of Dale, Craig Kopczak and James Harrison in the ‘middles’ looks to be a real nightmare for any opposition.