fevnut's musings 2024/#31: Toulouse, Goal Kicking and the Play-Offs

  

Toulouse

As we drove to the ground for our home match against Toulouse there was a question floating around in our brain – Could we be as good as we had been the week before against Bradford? Well, we weren’t as good as were against Bradford. Despite having played so well at Odsal we were even better against Toulouse. A great deal better.

Against Bradford we toughed it out and came away with the win. That had been fortunate as it was a late disputed penalty that gave us victory when it looked very much as if were about to lose.

Against Toulouse we looked a much more overall top performing team. And that was all the more praiseworthy bearing in mind the loss of Greg Eden at halftime which meant that Ben Reynolds had to move to full back which yet again disrupted our halfback combination.

When Toulouse scored their try in the 71st minute to leave Fev only four points ahead it got very tense but then came that wonderful try in the 77th minute that was, without doubt, the clincher. There was great build up work by the team and then came a wonderful kick from Dec Patton collected with a great leap to catch it by Gaz Gale and an off-load pass to Josh who scored despite a valiant attempt to prevent him touching down by the Toulouse defence.

 

Thinking back over the season so far, the two matches that really stand-out were this one and the challenge cup win against Wakefield.

We didn’t vote this time for a Man of the Match on the Fev fans facebook page because we reckoned that every single Fev player deserved the accolade.

 

 

Goal Kicking

In the 37th minute of the game away at Doncaster on April 14th, Connor Jones scored a try, but Ben Reynolds missed the conversion. Since then Ben has made 29 attempts to kick either conversions or penalties for Fev and has been successful EVERY TIME! And that includes quite a few touchline kicks including the two from Connor Wynne’s tries against Toulouse.

There will be some amongst our readers who will remember back in 2012 when Liam Finn set a new world record for successfully converting 41 successive kicks at goal. Well, you might think that Ben is getting close to that record but he’s rather further off it than you would think from what we have just written. After that game against Doncaster Ben went on to play for Hull KR and then Hull FC before he returned to Fev and he missed a kick while playing for Hull FC so his overall record of successive, successful kicks actually stands at 24.

Nevertheless, the fact is that we are currently blessed with two very accomplished kickers and they are the top two in the Championship in 2024.

We reckon that a goal kicking rate of 80% is very good and over 90% is outstanding.

Of course, goal kicking has got easier over time for a number of reasons. Notably better pitches, lighter balls and kicking tees. Unfortunately the practice of regularly recording goal attempts only began in 2006. We would love to have seen Steve Quinn’s record but that it is not possible and for the reasons given above it is almost certain to be lower than many nowadays.

We did take a look back between 2006 and today at the top records for Fev players and here are the ones who achieved 90% or over. When compiling such lists we always exclude players who have taken less than 10 kicks at goal (those who only took one or two goal kicks and were successful with them, like Luke Cooper's 2/2)) or players who played less than 5 games (Jarrod Sammut played just one game for Fev and kicked 10/10!).

 

Play-Offs

We are getting to that time of the year when we start to look at how the play-offs would pan out based on current league positions.

 

A few weeks ago there were several teams fighting to get into the play-offs but now it is beginning to look as if the only one currently outside the six who are a threat to those above them is York Knights. 

We could do with some big wins (and the potential is there) because York, at the moment, have a points difference that is 30 better than ours.

It could end up being one hello of a match in our last league match when we play York away. They are in a very good run at the moment so it could be an absolutely crucial match.

Here is a list of the last 5 games for Fev and York.