fevnut's musing's #09: What is a 'True Supporter', Matches against Widnes and Paul Sykes

What is a 'True Supporter'?

In recent weeks there have been countless posts on social media about the standard of Fev’s performances over recent weeks.

Many of those have been highly critical but at the same time there have been quite a number suggesting that true supporters should just support the club and not say or write critical views. Indeed we have seen some which suggest that you can’t be a ‘true’ Fev supporter if you express dissatisfaction with the way things are going.

fevnut has never taken that sort of stance. We will always question and criticise when we believe there are grounds for doing so. To not do so would be to suggest that we do not think about our club and surely all true supporters think deeply and often about the team they love.

When we retired we spent several years recording the entire history of Rovers matches (together with Mark Las Palmas) and digitising them until we have the Fev teams, results and scorers for every single one of the matches Rovers have ever played. That’s over 3,700 matches and more than 1,100 players. We followed up the initial work (which is still ongoing) by creating a database which enables us to produce the entire listing of matches against each other club and the complete playing record for every player including a lists of every match in which they played and the unique Heritage Number for all each of our players. And the databases can be interrogated to produce many more facts about Rovers history.

And you can add to that a huge number of hours spent editing the Rovers matchday programme and a great number as a trustee of the Featherstone Rovers Foundation.

We wonder how many of those who say you can’t be a true supporter if you criticise have devoted as much time and effort to Fev as we have done. We think we know the answer.

On the few occasions when we criticise we are still being a ‘true’ supporter. As a true supporter we spend a lot of time thinking and we criticise because we care, care passionately!

 

Matches against Widnes

There was a time in the late eighties when trips to away matches at Widnes were painful. In three successive league matches we conceded 62, 58 and 59 points. But we still carried on making the trip!

It was probably the memory of those sad journeys which made the game on May 1^st this year such a joy, with Fev scoring their record number of points against Widnes in that 74-6 win and taking Fev’s highest score against Widnes above the highest score Widnes ever achieved against Fev.

Then, only just over three months later, last weekend we played them at their place. We still won but only by virtue of a late try bringing the score to 20-16.

What on earth has happened to produce that sort of turn around in the scores. Yes, Fev are suffering from a host of injuries Yes, John Kear has dramatically improved the Widnes team and especially their defence. But neither of those factors are sufficient to explain such a huge change. For us, the greatest factors appears to be our defence and the spirit of the team.

As we said last week, our defence has drastically deteriorated and the great spirit of the team we saw earlier on this year seems to have evaporated.

Why???

 

An Incredible Career

It is rare that we pay a tribute in ‘musings’ to an opposition player, but we felt we couldn’t ignore the achievements of Paul Sykes and, after all, he is a former Fev player albeit for just the one season in 2015.

As we are writing this (on Thursday) Paul will be celebrating his 41^st birthday. It’s a remarkable age to still be playing and in a recent interview he stated that he wants to carry on playing as long as he is fit and healthy and still enjoying his rugby league.

Paul is the last player still active who played in the 20^th century! He was born on the 11^th August 1981 in Dewsbury and he made his début for Bradford Bulls as a 17 year-old coming on from the subs bench in a Super League match at Wakefield Trinity Wildcats on July 2^nd, 1999.

He was at Bradford from 1999-2002 although he spent the 2001 season on loan at London Broncos. He then became a London Broncos/Harlequins RL player from 2002 to 2007.

2008 saw him back at Bradford until 2012 although he spent most of 2012 on loan at Wakefield where he signed in 2013. In 2015 he spent that one season at Featherstone and then, in 2016 he became a Dewsbury player and has been there ever since.

Paul also played representative matches for England A, England, Great Britain and the Northern Union.

This year’s Summer Bash was special for Paul when he made his 500^th career appearance and it’s now 501 after last weekend’s match. 

During his career he has scored 148 tries, kicked 970 conversions and penalties and put over 20 drop goals. That’s a stunning tally of 2,552 points …. so far!

Well done, Paul, you are a legend of our wonderful sport.