fevnut's musings #13: History is Dangerous, RFL website (update) and Fev v Bradford

  

History is dangerous

When we were at school we hated ‘History’ because it seemed to be a matter of simply learning facts with no room for working things out or interpretation.

Nowadays, we find it enthralling and most particularly when it comes to the history of Featherstone Rovers. 

Recently there have been posts on facebook asking on which date our club’s centenary falls. To that question there are many different possible answers. It all depends on the centenary of what in particular.

Featherstone Rovers rugby league club was founded in 1902, so one answer to the question is that the centenary was actually 19 years ago on November 26^th 2002, that being a 100 years since the first game ever played by Featherstone Rovers!

In its first guise Rovers only lasted for 4 years before it went out of existence only to resurrected in late 1908. So there’s a second possible answer of 100 years since Boxing Day of 1908 when we believe the re-formed club played its first game.

So, the Centenary we are celebrating this year relates specifically to Fev being admitted to the senior competition of the Northern Rugby Football League (the fore-runner of the Rugby Football League). Once again there is more than one possible answer to when that centenary falls. You could say that the centenary fell a few days ago, June 7^th, which is one hundred years to the day since the Northern Rugby Football League voted unanimously to admit Featherstone Rovers into membership.

 

Another possible date is the centenary of when Featherstone Rovers played their very first match in the Northern Rugby Football League competition and that falls on August 27^th, a hundred years since we travelled to Bradford and surprised the rugby league world by winning 17-3.

We have tended to refer to these dates as the centenary of Fev becoming a professional club but it turns out that that is incorrect because a report from the 1920 Annual Meeting refers to players being paid before we joined the Northern Union.

 

We then thought that maybe we should think of this year’s centenary as being 100 years since we played in a competition of professional clubs. But that doesn’t work either because we were competing in the Challenge Cup for several years before 1921. One glorious date in our history was right back on March 17^th 1906 when we beat Northern Rugby Football League team, Widnes 23-2 in the second round (a more convincing win than last Sunday’s game).

We also need to mention the 1915-16 season. This was, of course, during the first world war and the official Northern Rugby Football League competition did not take place but nevertheless matches were played between many of the teams teams and an unofficial table was produced for what was named as the Wartime Emergency League. Several of the Northern RFL clubs had shut down completely for the duration of the war and Featherstone Rovers were invited to take part. The first game played in the Wartime Emergency League was on 4^th September, 1915 – a 13-3 defeat at Dewsbury. There were 24 teams in that ‘Wartime Emergency League’ but Fev only played matches against other Yorkshire teams.

 

Personally we choose to go with August 27th this year being the date of the centenary but that is a choice and not a fact!

Footnote: nowadays Mark Kirby (Mark las Palmas) and fevnut do extensive work recording data on Fev matches and players but we were preceded by Irvin Saxton who is incredibly knowledgeable about the history of the club and what we have written above relies hugely on Rovers history gathered by Irvin.

 

The RFL Website

No sooner than we wrote in ‘musings’ last week about the appallingly bad RFL official website than they started making major changes.

We would love to claim it as a response to what we wrote but that is obviously not the case! The changes must have been being planned for some time.

It is definitely starting to look better but the accuracy of the content is much more important than how it looks.

Several important features (fixtures, results, match reports etc.) are absent at the moment but we are promised that they will be back in the next few weeks. Let’s hope that they are vastly improved on what was there previously.

The ‘Match Officials Appointments’ section is revamped and back available. It includes all the match officials for each match and also gives the date and kick-off times. Sadly, once again, it contains incorrect information. Someone doesn’t understand the 24 hour time format. Let’s hope that Gareth Hewer doesn’t take cognizance of what is written on the website which says that he is refereeing the Halifax v York match on Sunday and that kick off is at 23:30. If he turns up for that he will be 12 hours late. The kick-off is at 11:30!

Anyone can make errors and fevnut makes loads. But fevnut works alone which is very different from information coming from the rugby league’s governing body.

n.b. Moments before publishing this edition of ‘fevnut’s musings’ the RFL got round to correcting the time of the Halifax match.

 

Sunday: Fev v Bradford

Bradford started off their season with a comprehensive 41-16 defeat by Fev in the Challenge Cup and then were soundly beaten 50-12 by Sheffield in their first Championship match. In the next match they scraped a 27-26 win against Halifax with a late drop goal

At that stage most people were writing off Bradford as a potential in the battle for top spots in the league.

But look at what has happened since. Between that Sheffield match and now they have played seven times, won every game and they are now the only team that is vying with Toulouse and Rovers for the top 3 places.

Should Bradford win on Sunday both Fev and Bradford will have lost just one match each and Bradford’s win % would be 88.9% and Fev (having played one game less will be on 87.5% taking Bradford up to second.

We don’t for a moment believe that will happen but it does mean that Fev will have to be at their very best.

We have many injury problems but perhaps none of them are as significant as Braford’s loss of Danny Brough with a serious arm injury. The Bull’s change of fortunes after the first couple of games of the season seem to have been largely down to the developing half-back partnership of Danny Brough with Jordan Lilley which only started in their third game, Jordan Lilley being absent in the first two.

Bradford have had several loan players and Fev have two available loan players on Sunday for the first time this year.

Assuming he plays it will be interesting what position Will Dagger takes. Fev have looked much better when we have had Dane Chisholm at fullback and Craig Hall on the wing. Fullback is a more difficult position to slot into with only the briefest of training opportunities with the rest of the squad. Although Will is primarily a fullback in his four games with us in 2019 he played three times on the wing and once at stand-off. So, it seems to us it could be Dagger on the wing and Hall at fullback but it could also well be the other way round.

 

Incidentally, Will Dagger has a 100% goal-kicking success rate for Fev but there again that is just three out of three, all kicked in a narrow 18-22 defeat at Toronto.