fevnut's musings 2024/#09: Away at Batley, A Shameful Mess and Internationalism

  

Away at Batley 

Under no circumstances could fevnut be described as a masochist but this morning, before writing this, we did something that comes very close to being able to be described as masochistic. The act in question was watching on RoversTV the first fifteen minutes of this match again!

It was a horror show and, but for the Brad Day try right at the end of the first half, it would have been a very sombre mood at half-time. During the interval we were by no means expecting a Fev win but at least there was a glimmer of hope. That glimmer was very much enhanced by the early try scored by Captain Addy in the 43rd minute and from then on we really felt that Fev had a good chance of winning the match, and, as we all know, we did. Even then, we had to wait right up until the 79th minute for Fev to take the lead. It must have been heart-wrenching for Batley supporters to have been in the lead from minute 6 to minute 79 and then to have the victory snatched away from them. But, we can’t feel sorry for them!

The reason we went and watched that first quarter of an hour again was to try and understand what had led us to going down 18-0 within such a short time. It was obvious that discipline, or rather lack of it, was a contributory factor. It is simply asking for trouble when you give away a penalty and a ‘six-again’ in quick succession. That’s something that needs to be addressed. However, by far the biggest factor seems to have been defensive errors. In retrospect, that was understandable. The withdrawal of Thomas Lacans shortly before kick-off was a big blow as it necessitated moving Caleb Aekins into the halves and then moving an inexperienced youngster in the shape of Louix Gorman into fullback.

It must have been very hard for him organising the defence (as all fullbacks have to do) when he had just come in on dual registration and must have had very limited time getting to know the Fev squad and our defensive structures. And there’s another factor. How much experience he has at fullback we don’t know but if you go to the Hull KR website you will find him described as ‘a young centre’ and his only appearance so far for the first team at Hull KR was indeed at centre.

Young Gorman looks to be a very promising youngster. He is still only eighteen years old and he captained the Ireland U19 team in the 1992 U19 European Championships. During that tournament he played at centre and in the halves, but not at fullback. We look forward to seeing how his career develops.

Earlier this year we wrote about looking forward to more close games than we saw in 2023, but we don’t know how much more the hearts of Fev supporters can take like the stress of the final minutes of the last two games.

  

What a mess

Back in the day, when it became clear that Fev needed to move from being a members club to a limited company, we served on a working party that was tasked with drawing up a constitution for the new company. We worked hard to put in place a structure that would indeed be a limited company but would still retain rights for club members. That structure must still be legally in place because it could not have been altered without consultation and voting involving the club members who became shareholders.

We hope very much that whoever takes over from Mark as the new club chairman will take a look at our official constitution and take cognisance of it.

Let’s be absolutely clear, Mark Campbell has put in a huge amount of time, money and commitment to Featherstone Rovers and for that we should all be very grateful to him.

We’re not going to speculate about how the club got into its current mess. Making accusations without having the facts at our disposal is definitely not helpful.

What we will say, again without definitive knowledge, is not paying wages due to players and staff is totally unacceptable and if contributions have not been paid into their pension funds that is unacceptable, too.

We need to note that this is, in part, down to the direction that our great sport is being taken by IMG and the RFL to the benefit of the élite few and to the total disregard to the consequences for the rest.

Fev has one of the most committed and loyal group of supporters of any club, in any sport, but that commitment and loyalty is being severely tested by the way things are going.

 

Internationalism

Please be patient with us. This is going to start off appearing to be a personal ramble, but it is going to lead to reflections about Fev and Rugby League.

In 2003, we were asked to attend a conference in Budapest that was looking at the implications of Hungary’s accession into the EU the following year. One day a group of young women asked whether they could join us for lunch as they had an issue they wanted to tell us about. At lunchtime they explained that they were Hungarian but lived in Romania and they were extremely worried that with Hungary joining the EU but, at that time, Romania not doing so, that would lead to severe restrictions on their ability to cross the border. In our naivety we asked them why their families had moved to Romania. “Our families never moved” one of the girls said, "They moved the border!". That’s the sort of thing that seems almost incomprehensible to those of us who live in an island nation where borders are governed by the sea.

Later, we discovered that Lviv, the city in which our maternal grandfather was born, has changed ‘nationality’ on numerous occasions. Here is the list from the time he was born in 1885.

In rugby league, currently, the international qualification rules state that you can play for any country from which you, yourself, your parents and your grandparents come from. It did make us wonder whether the situation of Lviv qualified us to play for Austria, Hungary, Russia, Poland and Ukraine! And for the rest of the family, we can add Germany, Lithuania and England! What a pity we are too old and too lacking in rugby league prowess to take advantage!

Turning this now towards Featherstone Rovers, you may have noticed that each week, at the bottom of our musing’s articles there is a graphic which contains a host of national flags. These are all the flags that we know 2024 Fev players are qualified to play for. This week we have added three more flags. One is Jamaica and apologies to our Jamaican player for not having included it earlier. The other two additions are Ireland and Turkey which are now included as a consequence of our dual reg players from last Sunday.

Because of our own multi-national background, we like to keep an eye on the national backgrounds of our Fev players. Here is our list for 2024 up to the present time. There may well be some international qualifications we have missed and if anyone can tell us about them, we would be very grateful.

As far as we know there has never been a team from French Guinea but, should there ever be one, Gadwin would be qualified to play for them because that's where he was born.

It’s been a real pleasure to see the big expansion of national teams in rugby league (both men’s and women’s) and in the last couple of years there have been matches involving teams like Kenya, Uganda, Chile, Brazil and many more.

But the freedom of qualification rules does lead to some rather silly situations. There have been several matches taking place in Australia with both teams made up entirely of Australians who have some family connection to other countries. An example of this was the match between North Macedonia and Poland played in Sydney last October. Particularly farcical has been the situation with Italy where entirely different teams have played under the Italy banner in matches in Australia and in Europe within a short space of time.

Still, we much prefer this to the days where the numbers of international teams could be counted on the fingers of one hand!