fevnut's blog

     Fev and Swinton have both published their 21 man squads for Sunday.  We find it quite difficult to see the potential shape of the teams in the form in which the clubs publish the squads so we just have to use guesswork, whilst taking into consideration the line-ups in each club's last match, to set them out in the traditional manner running from fullback to loose forward and then subs.

   Barrow   At our age, we have to restrict our travel to away games and the drive to Barrow and back in a single day seemed a bit too far to go so once again we had to rely on the audio commentary on RoversTV. The quality and reliability of this service seems to have improved a lot this year and for that we are very grateful. And talking of gratitude, that also applies to not having to do the long drive back in a state of depression after what was a really dismal performance. It felt difficult enough simply finding the energy to cook some supper on Sunday evening. Fortunately, we had prepared a lamb casserole in our slow cooker that chuntered along while the match was in progress so there wasn’t a lot more to do! Every team has bad days but last Sunday was a real shocker. Lots of errors, giving away silly penalties and we lost count of the number of times when we did make it into a strong attacking position only to end up handing them a tap on their 20-metre line with a ...

   Last week we were stopped before the Dewsbury match by a fellow Fev fan who asked us whether we could make fevnut's quiz questions a bit easier. Always happy to oblige, we have tried to do so this week and also (at the bottom of the page) supplied all the answers although we have put them in alphabetical order rather than in the order of the questions. So, here goes. See how many of the correct answers you can match up with the questions. Jim Denton (1921-1934) Steve Quinn (1976-1988) Paul Newlove (1992/93) Liam Finn (2012) - includes 2 drop goals Mick Smith (13 April 1968 against Doncaster), Chris Bibb (17 September 1989 against Keighley), Brad Dwyer (01 July 2018 against Rochdale Hornets) and Gareth Gale (26 June 2021 against Newcastle Thunder) Martin Pearson (26 November 1995 against Whitehaven) And the possible answers we gave you!

     Fifth time for Fev this year with this referee. So far, in 2024, he has been lower than average for penalties, yellow cards and red cards.

  

  We thought we would take a look at the implications for Fev's position in the Championship table depending on the result at Barrow. Sheffield beat Batley 36-13 on Friday and Widnes lost at Toulouse today (Saturday) This is the state of the table on Saturday night. Even if we were to lose, Toulouse remain below us. If Bradford (who are away at Batley) win and we lose, they would have to improve their points difference compared to ours by a mammoth 56 points to overtake us into 4th place and we can't see that happening! Now on to the much more likely scenario of Fev winning on Sunday. First of all, we would definitely climb above Widnes into 3rd place. There is also the rather distant possibility of us climbing up to 2nd place but for that to happen we would have to beat Barrow by at least 37 points to overtake Sheffield. It all points towards our match at Sheffield on June 16th as being a very important one.

    Fev and Barrow have both published their 21 man squads for Sunday.  We find it quite difficult to see the potential shape of the teams in the form in which the clubs publish the squads so we just have to use guesswork, whilst taking into consideration the line-ups in each club's last match, to set them out in the traditional manner running from fullback to loose forward and then subs.

  Dewsbury   Right at the beginning of the season we wrote about how we felt about Fev in 2024 and explained why we thought that we would have less blow-out scores and more exciting matches. You could say that a win by 46-12 is a blow-out score, especially bearing in mind that we missed out on several kickable conversions, but it certainly didn’t feel that way. We often hear the expression that ‘it’s a game of two halves’ but this time it was the first half that was a game of two halves. For the first twenty minutes we were awful. Never mind facing sets of six tackles, our inability to smother the ball in the tackle led to so many off-loads from Dewsbury and that meant that we sometimes had to make about ten tackles in order to complete six. Dewsbury’s first try was a bit flukey with a grubber kick bouncing off Paul Turner to give an easy score for Matt Garside. Their second try was an easy run-in for Owen Restall after Connor Wynne had been drawn out of position. But, even th...