fevnut's musings #02: What a start, Memories and Fev v Fax

    

What a Start!

There are always nerves going into the first match of the season, no matter who we are playing. All the more so when the opposition was such an unknown quantity as Keighley were.

The big question was how effective their halfbacks would be. A pairing of undoubted quality combining former Fev favourite, Dane Chisholm, with former Man of Steel, Luke Gale.

Any apprehension was soon blown away with a magnificent Fev performance. Viaplay nominated young Riley Dean as the man of the match and League Express selected him as the Fev Man of the Match. That’s some achievement for a 21 year old facing Chisholm And Gale.

We have no arguments whatsoever with the nomination of Riley but, in truth, virtually all of the 17 Fev players could have been selected. What a team performance they gave us.

Perhaps most pleasing of all was the feeling that they were so happy wearing the Fev shirt and really enjoying playing together. That’s a huge difference to the latter stages of last season and indicates what a stellar job our coaching team of Sean Long, Leon Pryce and Ian Hardman are doing.

It's early days and we mustn’t forget the euphoria when we beat Leigh in the second match last season. Nevertheless we are feeling really optimistic. Let’s see how it goes this coming Sunday.

 

Memories

At breakfast time this morning we went to the fridge to get things like milk and butter out and noticed how dirty the fridge door had become. So, after breakfast we set about cleaning it.

You might well wonder what on earth this has to do with rugby league in general and Fev in particular. Bear with us and you will find out.

Cleaning the fridge door is not a simple job because it is covered in fridge magnets representing wonderful places we have been to and a few other items of memorabilia. It’s a long process removing them all and then putting the back at the end.

We sat looking at two of the items which took us back to very happy times. They were tickets for Fev matches that we had kept proudly positioned on the fridge door. One was for the last time we played Cas in a competitive match. That was, of course, the stunning and never to be forgotten victory we had in the 4^th round of the Challenge Cup in April 2012.

We were sat in the main stand getting more and more excited. It didn’t begin too well with Cas taking the lead in the 5^th minute but we soon struck back and went in at halftime 20-10 up. During the break everyone was talking about whether we could hold on to our lead. It looked a bit ominous when Cas came back to just 6 points behind in the 69^th minute but our defence was magnificent and then in the 75^th minute we managed a drop goal to take us more than one score ahead and so the game ended with scenes of exhilaration in the stand with a 23-16 victory.

The question has to be whether we can succeed in getting into Super League at the end of this season and restore proper matches with them down the road!

Looking at the match details for that cup tie it’s interesting to note that, despite it being nearly eleven years ago, one of our team on the day is still very much at the core of our 2023 squad and another Fev player that day was actually playing against us in our season opener last Monday. And, of course, one of the Cas team played for Fev from 2020 to 2022.

The other ticket on the fridge door is for a challenge cup match we lost, but lost after a magnificent performance.

A young Fev team came mighty close to beating the Catalans Dragons in France in 2015, having taken the lead in the second half and still being ahead with less than ten minutes to go. Sadly, Catalans scored two tries in the closing minutes to win 37-34 but nothing could detract from a wonderful performance by our lads. Two who played that day are still with us, Jack Bussey and Luke Cooper (who, at the age of 20, was making his Fev début).

Fev v. Halifax 

If you look back over time Halifax have had a good record in matches against Fev.

At the time when we moved to the ‘Summer Era’ in 1996 we had played them played them 121 times with Halifax winning 67 of those and there had been 6 draws. Three of those 6 draws were in 1925 with two of them ending 0-0 and the other 2-2!

When the ‘Summer Era’ began Halifax were in Super League and there were no matches at all between Fev and Halifax until 2004 after Halifax had been relegated. Fev’s record in games since then has been much better with us winning 29 out of 47 matches.

Current Halifax fans must be sick of matches between us because Fev have won the last eight games, our longest ever winning streak against them. Let’s hope that it becomes 9 on Sunday.

To be fair, we ought to point out that it is still a long way to go to equal Halifax’s best run of wins against Fev because between 1943 and 1954 they won 14 games on the trot.

It’s well worth looking at the history of Fev v Fax matches and you can see the full record between us by clicking on the link to ‘Past Matches against Halifax Panthers’ page which you will find on the right-hand side of this page.