T'Other Side: Barrow Raiders

 

Head Coach: Paul Crarey

Paul Crarey has been Barrow’s head coach ever since 2015. In the Championship only Mark Aston at Sheffield has been head coach at a club for longer. He was also Barrow’s head coach from 2006 to 2007.

He had a short spell as Whitehaven’s head coach at the beginning of the 2008 but left in March of that year as a result of illness.

In his playing days he was a hooker and made over 170 appearances for Barrow as well as playing for Carlisle.

In 1992 he was hooker in the Cumbria side who played Australia in a warm-up match for that year’s World Cup.

 

Captain: Jarrad Stack

 

Australian second rower, Jarrad Stack, has been the Barrow captain since 2020. He arrived in the UK in 2009 to join Workington from Melbourne Storm at the age of 20. He then moved to Barrow in 2017.

He has played 329 games in the UK (171 for Workington and 158 for Barrow) and scored 113 tries (62 for Workington and 51 for Barrow).

 

Loan players and Dual Registration

On April 30th Barrow signed a dual registration agreement with Wigan Warriors that has seen Ryan Brown (loose forward), Jacob Douglas (wing), Tom Forber (hooker), Harvey Makin (prop) and Reagan Sumner (wing) playing for them.

Prior to signing the dual reg agreement they had already had Finley Beardsworth (second row), Tom Forber and Harvey Makin on loan from Wigan. From Salford, Amir Bourough (hooker) was briefly on loan in June and Jamie Pye (prop) is currently with Barrow. Kavan Rothwell (prop) has been on loan from Leigh Leopards.

Both Harvey Makin and Kavan Rothwell also had loan spells at Barrow in 2023. At that time Rothwell was a Wigan player.

 

The Fev connection

 

There are no players in the 2024 Featherstone Rovers squad who have previously played for Barrow Raiders.

 

For primarily geographical reasons only 2 players have played for both Fev and Barrow. 

 Ian Bell was a powerful centre who had a very strange career. He made his début with Hull FC but only managed one substitute appearance with them before being transferred in mid-season to Hull Kingston Rovers for whom he played four matches before receiving a lifetime ban for an assault on another player in an amateur match.

The ban was lifted prior to the 2009 season and he was signed by Barrow for whom he made 7 appearances and scored 2 tries but was released by them in April. In May he joined Fev and made a huge impact on his début scoring a hat trick  against Doncaster. In the next match (against Barrow) he didn’t play but he was back in the team the following week against Leigh and he scored another try. That was the end of his time at Fev.

In July he joined York and was there for the rest of the season and stayed with them in 2020 and 2011. But, In the two and half seasons as a York player he only played six times!

 

George Major hailed from Fev and played a single game for the first team in the 1939-40 season and two more the next year. Between 1941 and 1945 he played more regularly, primarily in the second row although for one match in 1943, when Rovers had an injury crisis amongst our backs he filled in at fullback.

During the 1944-1945 he played a few games for Barrow as a wartime guest player.

We have no record of what he was doing for the next few years, but he rejoined Fev in 1948, now playing as a prop. His last game was in September 1950. In total for Fev he played 78 times and scored 7 tries.

 

There are a few Fev players where we use a ‘{2}’ in there name because we have had two players with the same name. One such was Tommy{2} Smales, the loose forward (as opposed to Tommy Smales who was a scrumhalf).

This one played as an amateur with Sharlston and Featherstone before being lured across the Pennines to play for Wigan where he made his début in 1958 and he played on loan for Castleford in 1959.

In 1960 he was signed by Barrow and stayed with them for five seasons before coming back to join Fev in 1965. He played for Rovers for the last five year or his career, making 130 appearances, scoring 24 tries (including two hat tricks) and kicking 269 goals for a total of 610 points. He was a member of Fev’s 1967 Challenge Cup winning team (against Barrow) and in the final he scored a try and kicked 3 goals, a vital contribution to our 17-12 win. He later was Fev’s head coach in the 1974-75 season

There won’t be that many Fev supporters around today who saw him play, but many more will have watched his son, Ian.