Thursday, 2 September 2021

fevnut's musings #25: Goal Kicking, Referees and Heading to the Play-offs

 




Goal Kicking



We know that many Fev fans were surprised to see Brett Ferres step up to take the goal kicks while Dane Chisholm was in the sin bin. But it wasn’t a first for Brett.

He did some goal kicking early in his career, for Bradford in 2006 (2/2) and the following year for Wakefield (6/14). For fevnut the surprise was to see him apparently kicking, not particularly easy, conversions with apparent ease. Not bad after a 14 year gap!

He becomes the fourth member of an illustrious group of our current squad who have taken kicks at goal for Fev and never missed!

There is John Davies who kicked 2 out of 2 at home to Swinton in 2017. We can’t remember why Ian Hardman (who was playing that day) didn’t take the kicks. Neither Cory Aston or Michael Knowles were playing and we started with Kyran Johnson taking them. Kyran was quite a good goal kicker but he had an off day kicking only 2 out of 6 before John Davies took over.

In 2018, Luke Cooper successfully converted his one and only goal kick in a home match against Batley. It was 5 kicks out of 5 in that match, the other four being by Ian Hardman.

In 2019, in his first loan spell at Rovers, Will Dagger kicked 3 out of 3 in a narrow 18-22 loss at Toronto. Dane Chisholm was our regular kicker in 2019 but he didn’t travel to Toronto.

While we are on the subject of occasional goal kickers, Jack Bussey also merits a mention. In 2014 Fev’s main kicker was Gareth Moore but in 2 matches when Gareth wasn’t playing Jack did the job and he kicked a highly creditable 9 out of 11 attempts giving him a success rate of 82% which we seem to remember included some from the touchline. When you bear in mind that Craig Hall is at 74% and Dane Chisholm 79% this year it does make us wonder why Jack has not developed his goal-kicking skills.


Referees

For the match against Halifax we welcome to our Stadium a young man who seems to be going places. The referee is Cameron Worsley, a local lad, who at the age of just twenty-two seems destined for a stellar career.



He took charge of his first semi-professional game in 2017, just a few days short of his 18th birthday. Wow!

The RFL obviously believe he is a good prospect because, although he referees Championship and League One matches, he is one of the panel of eight full-time referees.

If he has the potential that it seems to be generally considered to be the case we hope fans don’t get on his back. This will be a big challenge for him with Fev against Fax matches having a history of getting quite feisty.

Another young man who has done a host of Fev matches this year is Aaron Moore. We don’t know his age but we do know that he is the younger brother of Super League referee, Liam Moore, who is 26 so he is younger than that. Last week Aaron was given the Super League match between Catalans and Leigh. It seems that Sam Tomkins was impressed by him and we reproduce a tweet from Sam about him.



Well done both Sam and Aaron. It’s nice to see players giving credit to referees.

 

Heading to the Play-Offs

Towards the end of a season fevnut always produces a table that shows which teams have guaranteed a place in the play-offs and which could still make it.

It’s been a nightmare this year. With the usual points system, it is fairly easy to work out but this year there has been a big problem because table positions are determined by percentages and they can go either up OR DOWN. In a normal season you know that however many points a team has got is the minimum they will finish with.

In case you haven’t seen it on our Championship Table page, here is the version of the table that shows the maximum and minimum percentages a team could be at when the regular season ends.



We have assumed, at this stage of the season, that games that have been postponed will not now be played.

And here, also, is our chart for the play-offs based on current table positions. Please take heed of our note at the bottom about which team will play the league winners in the semi-final.

Dates for Round One and Semi-Finals are provisional.

 

In case you should be interested in Super League here are the charts for that competition.





Milestones



Even without Craig Hall playing, there were milestones achieved by a couple of players against Oldham last week.

Despite not having the best of days with the boot, Dane Chisholm kicked his 150th goal for Fev.

Dean Parata scored his 100th career point and his 50th point for Rovers.




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