fevnut's musings 2023/#17: Winning Runs, Toulouse and Riley Dean

  

Featherstone Rovers: Winning Runs

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about some poor refereeing of a Fev match and was at pains to point out that referees are human and, like all human beings, they sometimes make mistakes.

Well, the same applies to rugby league statisticians and we made a big one when referring to Fev’s record winning runs in league games.

When we make a mistake we have a three way approach. First to apologise, second to try and work out how the error was made, third to put procedures in place to avoid the error being repeated.

Quite correctly, we informed you that the longest run of successive wins in Rovers’ history was 17 and that it had occurred twice. 

But then we stated that we would have to win all our matches up to and including the game against Whitehaven on July 2nd in order to break the record. WRONG! And for that mistake we now apologise.

After some investigation we have found what led to the error and realise how to avoid it being repeated. It came from the fact that we only update our results database at the end of the season so we forgot to add in the winning league run at the end of last season on to the winning start to this year.

We may have lost to Toulouse but we have set a new record! To the winning run of 13 at the start of 2023 we need to add on the 6 winning league matches at the end of 2022 which adds up to 19 – the new record – the most successive league wins in our history.

So, whatever we feel about the run ending, the team should be congratulated on a magnificent achievement.

 

Toulouse Olympique

Of course all Fev fans were bitterly disappointed about the team’s performance against Toulouse last Saturday. It took us a good couple of days to get over our feelings of gloom and doom and start to become a bit more rational about it. In amongst that lacklustre showing their were some really good contributions, notably from John Davies and Gadwin Springer.

In our opinion the really big problem was a lack of leadership and ability from half-backs to guide the team around the field and when you think about I that was hardly surprising. Losing Jonathon Ford after 6 minutes was a huge blow and no-one else was able to give us the sort of leadership, timing of passes and air of authority that he provides.

Please don’t think that this is a criticism of Thomas Lacans. We think that he is a terrific young prospect and we are amazed at the defensive work he puts in. Amazing for someone so small in stature! But he is young, is not yet able to provide the leadership, and needs to be paired with a more experienced partner.

It does demonstrate that with the loss of Riley Dean we are woefully short at half-back. Other players filling in to such a pivotal position is not going to be a solution. We desperately need some cover from a dedicated half-back. Undoubtedly the best performance we have had this season from a player taking an emergency role in the halves was Elijah Taylor against York and even he is out injured at the moment. We fear that, when we come across one of the other top Championship teams, there is no-one in our squad capable of taking on Johnathon’s Ford’s role and we are fearful of what the consequence might be.

 

Riley Dean

Riley Dean was announced as being at Fev on a season-long loan but, as often happens, that has turned out not to be so.

We were very saddened to see some Fev fans taking to social media to belittle his contribution at Rovers. It deserves praise and that showed by the fact that League Express selected him as the man of the match on three occasions.

There are two very big reasons why we intensely dislike the fact that he has now gone to Castleford. Now, more than ever we are desperately in need of another half-back (see above) and the fact that he has gone to Castleford makes it worse to this Fev fan!

However, we can understand what Warrington have done. He came to Fev to gain experience and has shown, without doubt, shown that he is very capable of holding his own, and more, at top Championship level. If Warrington are wanting to develop him to be ready to play regularly in their Super League team then they probably want him to now have some experience at Super League level. We will be watching with interest how his career develops.