fevnut's musings 2023/#18: Win #100 (maybe), Hookers and Our Play-off hoodoo
Win Number 100?
If you were to take a guess, we wonder who you would put in a list of
the ten clubs Fev have played the most matches against since we started in the Northern
Rugby League in 1921.
Here’s a clue. Because of the way fixtures were organised in the days
when there was only one league, all the top ten are Yorkshire clubs. Have you
had a go at listing them? We have posted the answer right at the bottom of this
issue of ‘musings’.
One of them is York and this will be match number 168 between us.
The current state of play is that Fev have beaten York 99 times so, a
win on Sunday, will bring up the century.
York would become the third club against whom Fev have scored a century of wins. The other two being Batley and Dewsbury.
Our Hookers
As most of you will be aware, when we publish the stats for our 2023
players we include a chart of milestones that players are getting close to.
After our match against Halifax on February 12th, Matty Wildie was showing in
that list as needing just one try to reach his 50th career try and to have
scored 200 career points. It’s been a long wait to get there but
congratulations to Matty who, when he scored a try against Broncos last Sunday,
finally reached those two milestones.
When we last drew up our list of this season’s Championship leading
scorers we saw that Connor Jones is in 7th place on the table of leading try
rates (Try rate is calculated as Tries Scored divided by Matches played).
Connor has scored 14 tries in 16 matches giving him a try rate of 87.5%.
But thinking about it, his try scoring rate is considerably better that
that stat indicates. One stat we are not able to keep, and we don’t know anyone
who does, is the number of minutes a player is on the pitch. In most games this
year Connor has been on the subs bench and has often not come onto the pitch
until late in the first half or only in the second half. We would love to be
in a position to calculate Connor’s rate of try scoring per minutes on the
pitch. If we could he would be much higher up that table and would almost
certainly be up with Lachlan Walmsley and our own Gareth Gale vying for the
very top place. A remarkable position for a hooker.
Our play-off hoodoo
In recent days there have been several heart-warming posts on social
media, from fans of other clubs, expressing their opinion that Fev deserve to
be promoted his year. But alongside those posts there have also pointing to Fev
bottling it in the play-offs.
During the time since play-offs were introduced in 1998, we have
suffered many bitter disappointments.
It all started in 1998 in the most dramatic of fashions when Karl Pratt
appeared to have scored a late try in our first Grand Final which was against
Wakefield and played at Huddersfield. Had the try been awarded it would
certainly have taken Fev into Super League for 1999, but it was disallowed and
Wakefield went up the field and scored a try that secured their promotion. The
try was disallowed for the minutest of knock-ons when Asa Amone picked up the
ball.
That incident has sparked many conspiracy theories but, in all honesty,
when we studied the video we had to conclude that the officials were correct.
We were back in the play-offs in the following 4 years, and again in 2004
but, in those years, we never got through to the Grand Final.
We did win a play-off final in 2007 but that was in the third tier after
we had been relegated at the end of 2005.
By the next time we got to play-offs, it was in the Championship, but it
was in the era of franchises and there was no promotion for winning the Grand
Final.
Of course, we then had that fantastic four seasons from 2010 to 2013
when we won the Championship league every time. But even then we only managed
to win the Grand Final once. We lost in the final in 2010 and 2012 but won it with a
40-4 win against Sheffield at Warrington in 2012. In 2013 we didn’t even make
it to the Grand Final after a huge shock, losing at home 21-20 against Batley –
a precursor of 2022!
In 2014 we only finished 2nd in the Championship but we did make it to
the Grand Final but lost to Leigh 36-12 at Headingley.
Then came the super 8s and no play-offs until they were re-introduced in
2019 which also saw the re-introduction of promotion for the Grand Final
winners. We made it to the play-offs in 2019, 2021 and 2022 (season curtailed
by Covid in 2020 and no play-offs), but there was to be no promotion with Grand
Final defeats to Toronto (24-6) in 2019 and Toulouse (34-12) in 2020.
Then, of course, last year we went out in the play-off semi-final with a
devastating loss at home to Batley by 32-28. A dire and totally unexpected
performance.
We haven’t written this to suggest that we will fail again this year. Far from it. This year should be the year
when we overcome the hoodoo and finally make it to Super League. To do that we
will have to play to our full potential in the play-offs but we really believe
we can do it. Past history doesn’t tell you what will happen next time!
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