fevnut's musings 2023/#19: Half-Backs, Whitehaven and 100 wins

 

Half-Backs

There can be absolutely no doubt, with the loss of Riley Dean and the injuries that Johnathon Ford has suffered, that we were in desperate need of adding to out half back options. So far this year we have used seven different players in the half back positions (Caleb Aekins, Riley Dean, Johnathon Ford, Craig Hall, Thomas Lacans, Elijah Taylor and Matty Wildie). Half back is a position that requires specialist expertise and only three of that list are specialists. The other four were very much filling in, out of their more usual positions.

Although those who have been asked to fill in tried hard to provide what was needed, we have seen several recent matches in which the biggest problem has been a distinct lack of leadership and creativity. Every team needs a half back who is capable of leading the team around the field and creating opportunities that make the best of the rest of the team.

As we have said before, we really like Thomas Lacans but he is young, lacks experience has looked a bit lost without a specialist half back partner. Dean and Lacans worked, Ford and Lacans worked, but the other pairings didn’t work anywhere near as well.

We are very interested to see what Logan Astley (our loan signing from Wigan) can bring to the team. There is no doubt he comes with a good pedigree but he is very young and lacking in experience and it is hard to see him leading a pack with many players who are over 30. Maybe we will be proved wrong, but it is hard to imagine a halfback pairing of Astley and Lacans being very effective except against the weakest teams in the Championship.

A couple of days after the announcement of Logan Astley came the news that we had brought Dane Chisholm back to Rovers as a full signing. We are very, very happy about that. The memories came flooding back of matches in which we were on the edge of our seat waiting to see what he would do next. At his best, he is an imaginative creator and a real entertainer. We will never forget that time when he went nearly the length of the field, put the ball down under the posts and then feigned to use it as a pillow to have a quick nap!

The way he was treated last season was a terrible disappointment to us and the vast majority of Fev fans. It’s going to be so good to see him back ‘home’. Mind you we weren’t too pleased to see him on the field at a training session on Wednesday with a shaved head. Why not – already we sometimes confused between Matty Wildie and John Davies and now we have a third baldy of about the same height!

We do have one slight misgiving. When Ford is fit again we think the combination of Ford and Chisholm could be absolutely fantastic, but while Ford is out who is going to be the guide for the team? The beauty of Dane is those maverick moments he provides but is he going to be able to become the leader when Ford is unavailable?

 

Whitehaven

 

Over history there have been quite a few times when Fev have struggled when we have to travel to away matches at Whitehaven.

Earlier this year we annihilated them 76-4, following up on our record win against them by 78-0, at home last year. Two years and an aggregate score of 154-4!!

However, we don’t see it as being an easy task on Sunday for several reasons.

First, because it’s up at Whitehaven which means a long tiring journey before the team get onto the field.

Second, Whitehaven’s recent form is much improved since we played them in February. They have won three out of their last four games and that includes a strong performance against Widnes (36-12) and a big surprise when they went to Sheffield and took them apart (40-26).

The third cause for misgivings is that we will have yet another new half back pairing which will inevitably take time to settle in to playing at their best.

On the other side we will be facing a Whitehaven team playing their third game in eight days after they played York at home on Wednesday. A re-scheduled match because the original date for this game (June 18th) was the weekend of the Challenge Cup Quarter Finals which involved York.

Whitehaven are now in ninth place in the Championship but they are better than that sounds. They are level on points with the teams in seventh and eighth and it is their points difference (for which we are largely responsible) which keeps them down in ninth.

Will we win on Sunday? Yes, we are sure we will so long as we don’t think it will be easy.

 

Win Number 100

Talking of York, last Sunday saw us beating them for the 100th time. We also took our sequences of successive wins against York to nine. A long way to go to match the reverse stat because York beat us 17 times in a row in the 1930s but that was the poorest decade in Fev’s history.

York become the third team that Fev have beaten 100 times.