fevnut's musings 2023/#24: Halifax and Derbies

   

Halifax Panthers

The most predictable thing about Halifax in 2023 is that they are so unpredictable. And that is aptly illustrated by the two previous matches this year against Fev. In February Fev beat them 48-22 in the second league match of the season only for Halifax to return to the Millenium Stadium exactly four weeks later and knock Rovers out of the Challenge Cup in the 3rd round with a 22-18 scoreline.

That was undoubtedly one of Halifax’s two best performances of the season. The other also came in the Challenge Cup when in the 6th round they lost 26-6 to St. Helens but for any Championship club holding St. Helens to just 26 points has to be seen as a very positive achievement. In the league they have lost to Widnes (42-14) in February and been taken apart by Batley (42-0) in July.

On the positive side they have made it to Wembley in the 1895 cup. Many people have been wondering what effect that will have on their performance this Sunday, coming just 6 days before that 1895 Cup Final. We were glad to see York beat a resurgent Broncos last weekend. Had Broncos won that match then it would have tipped Halifax out of the play-off places where they have been since mid-March and we thought that, if that had happened, it might well have given the Panthers extra motivation for the Fev game, despite their upcoming Wembley date.

Sunday’s match brings together the two leading try scorers in Championship matches in 2023. Lachlan Walmsley is well ahead now on 30 and Gareth Gale on 21. The only other Halifax player currently in the top 20 is James Woodburn-Hall with 11 tries but Fev have four more players in that top 20 list: Connor Jones (17), Caleb Aekins (12), Luke Briscoe (11) and Joey Leilua (10).

Halifax fans must be sick of attending matches between their team and Fev at the Shay. Fev haven’t lost a match there since 2018 and have won all of the last eight. Just imagine what Fev fans would feel if we had a home record like that against another Championship team! But, of course, sequences like that come to an end eventually, let’s hope it doesn’t happen this weekend.

Although Fev lost at the Shay in 2018 we also won all the league games there between 2009 and 2017 to produce an extraordinary league record at the Shay of having won 13 out of 14 matches since 2009!

 

Milestones

Congratulations to Chris Hankinson who went past 50 points for Fev last Saturday and he is now only 11 points short of reaching 1,000 career points. Caleb Aekins needs just two points to take him to 50 for Fev and Mark Kheirallah need 7 goals to reach 700 career goals.

 

Derbies

There is always a very special atmosphere when teams are involved in Derby games but sadly it is now a long time since Rovers had that experience. They bring large crowds, a very lively stadium and that feeling that the result matters more than most. There will be quite a number of our younger fans who have never had such an experience.

A few weeks ago we were trying to explain to a young lad what it meant to the club, the players and the fans when we drew 18-18 at home against Castleford in the semi-final of the Yorkshire Cup in October 1989 and then, 10 days later, beat them in the replay 28-26 at Wheldon Road. Matches with score lines like that are always exciting but when they are against local rivals the tension is multiplied many times over. We lost the final but the thrill of the semi-final more than made up for that disappointment!

It is now more than 11 years since we had a competitive game against either Castleford or Wakefield.

The last time we played Wakefield was in the First Division Grand Final at Huddersfield in 1998. We won’t repeat here the controversies over the Karl Pratt try, something we have written about several times. Needless to say we lost and it was horrible going into the off-season, desperate to get back to playing and winning again.

The last match against Cas is a much happier memory. Challenge Cup 2012. Very few pundits gave Championship Featherstone a chance against Super League Castleford, but our team rose to the occasion, buoyed on by a very noisy crowd and we won 23-16. We scored all of our 4 tries in the first half and then put up a miraculous defensive effort in the second half and a drop goal from Liam Finn in the 75th minute took us 7 points clear! We still have our ticket for that match proudly in place on the door of the fridge! Remarkably one of the Fev team that day is still with us …. Captain Lockwood.

So many times over the last eleven years we have yearned to have that derby game experience once more. And now the odds on having at least two Derby games in 2024 have become really high. It’s unlikely that we will have games against both Cas and Wakefield. If we realise our ambition to get into Super League we will probably play just one of them because it is now almost certain that either Wakefield or Cas will be in the Championship. So even if we should fail to get promoted we will still have derby games against whichever of the two get relegated.