fevnut's musings #01: Good to be back, Chizzy and Heritage Numbers

  

So good to be back

Thank goodness for Christmas and New Year. They do make up just a little bit for the misery of going months without a Fev game to go to! This year there is even more of a buzz about the place largely because of the fantastic squad that has been assembled. We have a new coach who brings with him a tremendous winning history and we are all hoping that he can get Fev back to where they truly belong.

Sadly, we have a poor record of losing in the big end of season matches after performing really well during the league season. Many of us remember that last gasp defeat by Wakefield in the 1998 Grand Final. Then there was the amazing success winning the Championship league four times in a row from 2010 to 2014 but only once following up by winning the Grand Final. And, of course, in 2019 and 2021 losing in the Million Pound Game.

It may be rather early for this but fevnut is more excited than usual and believes that winning both the league and the Million Pound Game is a real possibility with this team and coach.

It all starts at York’s new community stadium on Monday and hopefully it will end at Post Office Road on October 2^nd with a huge party following our promotion to Super League. 

 

Chizzy

We were appalled when the news of his 8 match ban was announced. The RL disciplinary system is clearly not fit for purpose. As we understand it the sentence was determined on the basis of one person’s statement with no evidence whatsoever to back it up and against Dane’s denial of the accusation.

This is not JUSTICE. It also sets a potentially very damaging precedent. It means that any team official can accuse opposition players of verbal misconduct and get them banned.

fevnut knows that Dane is not guilty of using the words he was accused of. How do we know? We were very close to the incident and could hear the exchange. We can’t remember what Dane actually said but, after campaigning for more than 50 years against the use of discriminatory language, we would have certainly remembered if the words he used were indeed discriminatory. Not only that, but had the accusation been true but we would have spoken to Dane after the match and told him how unacceptable it was. 

Had the procedures taken place in a court of law the accusation would have been thrown out. Indeed in our view, there are grounds to take the matter to a court for denial of a person’s right to work in a prejudicial manner.

Heritage Numbers

At the recent Fans Forum we were asked about what the Heritage Numbers were for our new players. We had to explain that the Heritage Numbers would depend on the order in which they make their débuts so we cannot tell yet.

What we can say is that the new players this year will get Heritage Numbers from 1,135 but there are a some ‘new’ players who already have their Heritage Numbers from previous appearances with Fev. Luke Briscoe is #1,046. The other signing pleased us very much and not just from a playing point of view. Kyle Trout played some games for Fev on dual registration from Wakefield in 2014 and 2015 and his Heritage Number is 1,000. It used to really irk us that such a significant number had gone to a dual reg player so we are happy that he is now an actual Rovers player.