fevnut's musings 2023/#06 Riley Dean, Attendances and Winning Sequences
Riley Dean
We’ve seen
a few very worried posts about Riley Dean being recalled by Warrington.
Not
surprising really as he has been a real lynchpin of our best performances in
2023. In the eight matches we have played so far (including the pre-season
games) League Express has named him as man of the match four times.
There can
surely be no doubt that, at the age of just 21, he has huge potential to become
a really top class player. But we feel much more sanguine about that recall and
very much what we are about to say turns out to be the real reason for the
recall.
Let’s think
about the halfback situation at Warrington. They have Josh Drinkwater and
George Williams performing excellently at the moment and working together
really well. Josh Drinkwater seems to be providing the partnership that George
Williams needs to allow him to play to his full, very great, potential. They
also have in their first team squad three promising young halfbacks in Riley
Dean, Aiden Doolan and Leon Hayes.
Warrington
obviously deemed it the best route for Riley’s development to let him have
consistent game time with Featherstone, but they would never have let him
become cup-tied by playing for us
against Halifax on Sunday.
It seems
highly probable to us (and sensible) to bring him back while Fev are playing in
the cup and give him a bit of time in their squad preparations for this week.
As long as Drinkwater and Williams are fit we very much doubt if he will
actually play in their game away at Hull KR.
We suspect
that he will be back at Fev next week. It is also likely that if either
Drinkwater or Williams pick up an injury at some stage of the season that he
will be recalled. We are sure that is something that Sean Long will be well
aware of and will have thought about how we would cope with that situation.
Let’s have
a bit of fantasy: Fev get to the Challenge Cup Quarter Final without him and
Warrington get knocked out in the 6th round without Riley playing.
Then he could become available to play in the remaining cup games, including
the final!
Attendances
Before
Monday’s game there was a bit of despondency about our home attendances. It is
really difficult at this stage of the season to see how things are going
because comparisons with previous seasons are subject to many different factors
including weather, kick-off times, school holidays, availability on television
etcetera.
Nevertheless,
three out of four home games so far have shown increases over 2022. The away
support for both the Newcastle and Whitehaven matches might well have been
better at a warmer time of year and the Newcastle support will have undoubtedly
been affected by Newcastle United playing at Wembley that weekend.
The
attendance on Monday was a phenomenal increase on the 2022 despite it being on
television. You could also argue that the attendance of Halifax fans will have
been depressed (definitely the right word) by the fact that they must be sick
of seeing their side lose to Fev (see below).
Winning Sequences
Each week,
in the ‘Past Matches’ page of the blog we include statistics on winning and
losing sequences against our next opposition.
We have been
somewhat surprised to discover how many of our records against the 11 other
Championship teams shows us to be on our longest ever winning runs against
them. Halifax is a case in point. We have won the last 9 matches against them
which is a record which is one of those longest ever runs.
What
partially caused the surprise is that you would have thought more of our best
runs would have come in the period around the time when we won the Championship
League four times in a row from 2010-2014.
Only two
clubs in the championship beat us the last time we played them and Rovers fans
won’t need or want to be reminded which clubs they are! We can put that right
on April 7th and June 10th Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to
say that the last time we played every club in our league, we were the winners.
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