fevnut's musings 2024/#07: Fev Slaughter Wakefield, Disciplinary System and Who is it?

 

Fev Slaughter Wakefield Trinity

No, that’s not a prediction of the outcome of Sunday’s Challenge Cup fixture! We are travelling back nigh on 50 years to the most glorious season of 1976-77. The season opened well with a huge victory against Doncaster in the Yorkshire Cup by 54-5, but that was against a second division side who lost all bar one of their league fixtures that year. The most spectacular result was to come later in the season.

On January 2nd, Wakefield came to Post Office Road for a First Division tie. Fev were decidedly the favourites going into the game. We had already beaten them 16-9 at Belle Vue in the 2nd Round of the Yorkshire Cup back in August, but nothing could have prepared for what the supporters of both teams were about to witness in that first game of 1977.

The Pontefract and Castleford Express described it as a massacre!

Fev were 10-0 up after only 11 minutes with tries from Dale Fennell and Ken Kellett. Then in the 15th minute, Wakefield second rower, Mick Morgan was sent off following a scuffle with Fev hooker, Keith Bridges. Just a couple of minutes later, Fev received a blow when fullback Harold Box was taken off with a shoulder injury. He was replaced by 18 year-old John Gilbert, making his début, who went into the centre with the ‘Mighty Quinn’ moving to fullback. That meant that Fev now had three teenagers on the field, the other two being Dale Fennell (scrumhalf) and Steve Evans (centre).

Getting close to halftime Fev were now 20-0 ahead when Trinity player coach, Brian Lockwood, was also sent off after an off-ball incident in which he felled Jimmy Thompson. Steve Quinn added a penalty to bring the halftime score to 22-0.

After the interval, Fev added six more tries including one from Charlie Stone with a 60 yard run. Steve Quinn scored one which the P&C described as a ‘grand try’ and was ‘superbly set up Vince Farrar and John Newlove’ and débutant, John Gilbert, took advantage of a dropped pass by Trinity, kicked ahead and re-gathered scoring the first of his 80 tries for Rovers.

The 52-0 scoreline became Fev’s best ever against Wakefield and remains so to this day. It easily overtook the previous best which had occurred in 1927 when Fev beat them 29-18. Despite the fact that Wakefield have won 68 times to Fev's 64 (with 8 draws) their best ever result was 48-0 in 1943.

Steve Quinn kicked 11 goals from 12 attempts which was just one short of the then Rovers record of 12 by Don Fox, a record subsequently overtaken by Mark Knapper with 13 which was equalled twice by Liam Finn.

What a Rovers pack that was! We also had a chance to look at the match report in the Wakefield Express (who didn’t call it a ‘massacre’ but did headline it ‘That debacle at Featherstone’) and they described the Rovers front three as ‘possibly the best front row in the league’. And that was without including Charlie Stone, Peter Smith and Keith Bell. All bar Keith Bell played full internationals for England and/or Great Britain but nevertheless the P&C described Keith as ‘the outstanding forward whose ball-handling artistry was never more evident’. Although he never received a full international cap Keith did play for both Great Britain U24 and Yorkshire.

 

There are other Fev players, for example Mal Dixon and Brendon Tuuta, who deserve to be included in a list of Fev’s greatest ever forwards but as a group, this pack has never been equalled and almost certainly never will.

A footnote: Wakefield winger, John Archer and Charlie Stone had previously played together for Pontefract RUFC. When, in 1970, John signed for Wakefield and Charlie for Featherstone those down at Pontefract expected John Archer to make the bigger impact on rugby league. How wrong they were!

 

Disciplinary system

An interesting suggestion has come from Brian Carney. He is suggesting that disciplinary matters should be dealt with like the points system on a driving licence whereby a varied tariff of points are given for offences and players would be banned when they reach a certain number of points. We think that this is an idea worth discussing in detail and we hope that the RFL will give this idea full consideration.

Earlier this year Martyn Sadler (who we rarely disagree with) suggested that players should only be banned from the competitions in which the offence took place. That suggestion was made at a time when it looked as if Harry Smith might get a ban preventing him from playing in the World Club Challenge. Thankfully, the issue didn’t arise as Smith didn’t get a ban. But we don’t think Martyn had properly thought his idea through. Let’s say a player was sent off in a losing Challenge Cup match and the offence was deemed to be worthy of a ban. If this idea was enacted it could be virtually twelve months before it came into force and if the team lost at the first hurdle the next year, a ban of more than one match would extend into, at least, a second year!

 

Who is it?

We use a statistic which we call ‘try rate’. It is simply the number of tries a player has scored divided by his number of appearances, expressed as a percentage (e.g. if a player scores 36 tries in 48 appearances they would have a try rate of 75%). We only count players who have scored at least 25 tries, which excludes the likes of Ian Bell who only played twice for Fev and scored 4 tries (200%).

The second highest try rate in Fev’s history is held by Paul Newlove with 81.3% (122 tries in 150 games). But sitting above him in the try rate table is a player with a score of 147.4% (28 tries in 19 games) Who do you think that might be?

In his 19 games he scored two hat tricks, scored a brace of tries seven times and only failed to score twice.

We will reveal his identity in the next ‘fevnut’s musings’.