fevnut's musings 2024/#22: York, Toulouse and Record Victories

 

Pre-Amble

We have been to Toulouse quite a few times and always enjoyed the trip but this year we decided to give it a miss and use the time for a visit to see relatives, including two gorgeous grandchildren, who live a little way south of Aberdeen. As a result we have not been able to post as much in the blog this week. We will try and resume the complete service next week although we won’t be able to post details of the match in Toulouse until late Monday, at the earliest.

And that is also why this is a rather shorter ‘musings’ than usual.

York

Is there anything worse, when things have been going badly, to have a huge improvement and then suddenly for everything to go belly-up again.

Twenty minutes into last weekend’s game we were feeling so happy. After three dismal performances we were back to playing really well and were leading 16-0. Surely we were on our way to breaking the sequence of three lost matches.

We are still scratching our head at what happened. Of course, part of it was down to York coming out for the second half determined to make a real game of it but that is no excuse for the abject performance of our team. After some electrifying offence in that first twenty minutes we seemed to be gifting it to York with ridiculous failures to correctly play the ball and  terrible handling areas.

We are NOT saying that this was the reason but it felt as if the players had only been paid a quarter of the wages that were due to them and they responded by deciding to play at their best for a quarter of the match and then give up bothering for the rest of the game.

 

This is ironic

Do you know the two highest scores we have ever achieved in league matches?

The highest ever was against York in 2001. A match which we won 92-2. Back then we didn’t record the try times or the scoring sequence. We will endeavour to find out how it came that York kicked that penalty for their two points. Was it early on and they were taking the lead or maybe they just didn’t want to be nilled?

That record remains the highest score and winning margin in a league match although it was surpassed in a Challenge Cup tie in 2004 when we beat Castleford Lock Lane 96-0!

And here’s the irony, the highest league score ever against York (last week’s opponents) and the second highest which came ten year later against this week’s opposition, Toulouse.

Well, the odds against us doing that this week must be several billion to one! But it would be fantastic if the team played the whole match like they started last week but the sad fact is that we are facing a far stronger team than York.

We produce a form guide which is a league table based on each club’s last five matches and the gap between Toulouse and Fev is huge.

But ‘Always look on the bright side of life’!! Stranger things have happened!!