A fevnut special: Fev's Longest Serving Players

 

The other day we were asked who Fev’s longest serving player was. As is so often the case, there is more than one possible answer to that question depending on the interpretation of ‘longest serving’.

 

For a large part of our history Fev survived by developing local talent and then selling some of our most talented players to ‘bigger’ clubs. For many of those lads their hearts remained with Fev so, unsurprisingly, they returned to Fev towards the end of their careers.

 

So, if you take long serving to be the length of time between a player making their Fev début and playing their last match for the club that encompasses time spent at other clubs in between.

 

Our first reaction when asked the question was that it would be that wonderful player, Keith Bell who is still seen regularly at Rovers and Lions (when Covid is not interfering), but we thought we had better check.

 

As a result we produced the chart below which shows the longest 100 serving players. In order to be clear, we have shown those whose playing career was continuous at Fev in bold and Keith is decidedly the longest in that category. Keith played his first game in Fev’s first team as an 18 year old on November 28^th 1978, in a home match against Wigan and his last game was also at Post Office Road on 20^th March 1990 (aged 36) against Batley in the weird one-off competition called ‘Top Try’. After playing in 19 consecutive seasons for Fev he finished with two years at Hunslet. At Fev played 417 games, scoring 57 tries, 8 goals and an amazing 66 drop goals for a total of 264 points.

 

But the longest from début to last match goes to Terry Clawson.

 

Terry made his Fev début for Fev at the age of seventeen on December 28^th, 1957 at home to Bramley and played his last Fev game at the age of 38 on November 12^th, away at Rochdale. In January 1965 he was transferred to Bradford Northern and went on to also play for Hull KR, Leeds, Oldham, York and South Newcastle (Aus) before returning to Fev and making his second début for Fev on New Year’s Day 1978 away at Wakefield. Despite playing on at Fev until he was 38 years old that wasn’t the end of his playing career as he went on to play for Wakefield and Hull. For Fev Terry played 215 games, scored 41 tries and kicked 483 goals for a total of 1,089 points.

 

We collected our data from a database which currently runs from our beginning in 1921 to the last game we played in 2020. We make that point because James Lockwood is in 88^th place on the table but he had already lengthened his Fev stay by  one year and 15 days when he played against Batley on April 2^nd this year which takes him up to 66^th place and rising.

 

Look out on the chart for several other 21^st century players. You will find Stuart Dickens, Steve Dooler, Liam Finn, Ian Hardman, Jamie Rooney, Tim Spears and Greg Worthington.