fevnut's musings 2024/#19: Swinton, Our History and an Amazing Achievement

   

Swinton

 

We never anticipated that we would feel considerably worse after our match last Sunday against Swinton than we did following the loss to Barrow the week before.

We were playing at home, against a team that were six places below us in the table and one that we had beaten in the previous sixteen matches against them. The last time Swinton had beaten Fev was way back in 2013. But what made it even worse was that we somehow managed to lose a match in which we scored 40 points and that we had twice been leading by a comfortable twelve point margin.

We have previously written about how damaging our constantly changing halfback partnership has been and this time we had yet another different pairing. But we have also begun to wonder to what extent the ever-changing line-up as a partial consequence of the dual registration partnership with Hull Kingston Rovers is also a contributory factor with Jack Brown becoming the ninth different Hull KR player to play for Fev this season.

 

Our History 

This week we have read many posts from Fev fans who seem to believe that the two losses to Barrow and Swinton are a disaster and that a once great club are sinking to depths never before plummeted.

Before we continue, we want to stress that we love Featherstone Rovers. Why else would we have spent a huge amount of time cataloguing the history of the club by digitising the details for every player who has ever played for Rovers, results and team sheets for every game Fev have ever played as a professional club and a lot more besides. We also spent four years editing the Rovers matchday programme and now, of course, we have devoted ourselves to producing ‘fevnut’s blog’ which we started as a response to the many fans telling us, after the club decided to abandon producing programmes, how much they missed having their programmes.

Reading those posts, so many fans seem to believe that we have always been a ‘top club’. Of course, we have had some glorious times. Notably our three amazing Challenge Cup wins, and also finishing at the top of the Rugby League Championship at the end of the 1976/77 league season. Not only did we finish at the top, but we did so by five clear points. 

But the story of Fev as a professional club is far from being a consistently ‘top club’. We did begin our life remarkably well and by the 1927/28 season had got to the dizzy heights of finishing 3rd in the table and reaching the Play-off final (where we sadly lost to Swinton!). Probably the greatest achievement of all is that we have survived through thick and thin, despite having by far the lowest population base of any of the professional clubs and with having two other major clubs only a few miles away.

We do wonder how those so-called fans who are abusive about our performance this season would have reacted had they been around in the 1930s when we struggled and were perennially in the very bottom reaches of the table. Thank goodness there was no social media then to give them a vehicle for their bile.

Here is a chart showing how we finished in the table from the 1930/31 season through to 1952/53 (omitting the second world war years).

Of course, in 1995 we were unjustly excluded from the top tier for the summer era. Since then, we have generally been a top achiever in the second tier with a major disappointment when, at the end of 2005, we were relegated to the third tier where we spent two seasons before re-gaining second tier status.

To keep a true measure of where Fev sit amongst the professional rugby league clubs hierarchy we use ‘ranking’. To briefly explain that, when we finished top of the Championship for four years in a row our ranking was 13 because there were 12 clubs above us in Super League. So here is our ranking since 2005. 

Our conclusion: Featherstone Rovers is a truly wonderful club that has achieved remarkable success for a club based in such a small town and produced occasional unbelievably great moments in our history. A club that has probably the greatest linkage between the town and the club of any team in rugby league and probably in any other sport as well. It is a heritage we should be incredibly proud of, and we shouldn’t over-react when we have some periods when we don’t reach the pinnacles that we have sometimes gloriously climbed.

 

Amazing achievement 

As most of you will be aware, in 'fevnut's blog' we regularly publish and update our ‘Championship: Leading Scorers’ page. We now do a version of it for supporters of other clubs and it has been very warmly received by them.

If you analyse the leading try scorers table there is something really remarkable about it.

Last year the top 10 try scorers included 6 wingers, 2 centres, 1 fullback and 1 hooker (who was in 4th place).

So far this year, we have 12 players in our ‘Top Ten’ because there are six of them in joint 7th place. Those twelve players include 5 wingers, 2 centres, 2 fullbacks, 1 halfback, 1 player who has played both second row and centre, and, once again, 1 hooker.

Most remarkable about the hooker (the same one who was in last year’s Top Ten) is that he now occupies joint 2nd place in the 2024 table. 

We wrote recently about the changing role of hookers and the fact that they tend to score far more tries than in days gone by, but, nevertheless, for a hooker to finish 4th in the top Championship try scorers in 2023 and now to be in second place in 2024 when no other hookers get anywhere near that level is truly momentous!

It will be no surprise to you all when we reveal that this amazing hooker is, of course, Connor Jones. At the moment he stands as Fev’s top try scorer in 2024 with 14, followed by Connor Wynne on 11 and Gareth Gale on 10.