fevnut's musings 2024/#32: Barrow, Golden Point and High Score Losses

   

Barrow

‘A win is a win’ people often say but nevertheless, we were nowhere near as happy with the Barrow game as we had been with our two previous games against Bradford and Toulouse. A very niggly game and, although we scored more points than in the two previous games, our attack didn’t seem to be nearly as fluent, and the defence let in some tries that should have either been stopped or ruled out by the referee.

That may sound negative but there were some good aspects. Particularly the form of Jack Arnold who seems to get better with every game he plays for Fev. When he first arrived, we didn’t see why we had signed him but now he is becoming a player who should be on the teamsheet for every match. Another local lad prepared to really graft for the team.

The good news is that we are now sitting in fifth place with an opportunity to consolidate that when we play Sheffield in a week’s time., assuming we beat Swinton this coming weekend. And with Widnes being just one point above us and still having to play Toulouse and York, there is real opportunity to get into 4th and gain a home match in the play-off eliminators.

You can see the table and the current play-off chart in our ‘Championship 2024: Table, Results, Fixtures and Form Guide’ by clicking on this link.

https://bit.ly/3vvl6zb

 

 

Golden Point

The entire concept of Golden Point seems to us to be making a mockery of Rugby League. We do understand the reasoning behind employing it in knock-out competitions but to use it in a league competition makes no sense at all.

Thank goodness we don’t have it in the Championship or League One. So why is it deemed necessary in Super League. We can only assume that it was introduced at the behest of Sky television and under no circumstances should they be allowed to interfere in the way the sport is run. Can you imagine the outcry that would ensue if football’s Premier League decided to introduce penalties to produce a winner in a drawn league match and that had a determining consequence on relegation or qualification for European competitions.

In another, seemingly unrelated question, we have been appalled by the way London Broncos have been treated as a consequence of the RFL/IMG partnership which has introduced this grading system which is supposedly based on measurable statistics, but the manner in which the stats are chosen and implemented are highly subjective. An example of that is the decision to regard the catchment area for the Broncos as being only the London Borough of Merton in which their ground is located. And yet they are the only professional team in London and, with the ease of public transport around the capital, surely their catchment should be the population of the Greater London area and possibly parts of Surrey as well.

As a kid we lived in the West/North West of London. I remember, painfully, n occasion, when I was about eleven years old, having a huge row at home and promptly running out of the front door and walking (I didn’t have any money) to my aunt and cousins house which was in Merton, quite close to the Broncos ground.

It would clearly be a big embarrassment to the RFL if London Broncos do not finish bottom of the Super League prior to their eviction (you can’t really call it relegation). We wondered whether Golden Point had any bearing on this. Obviously it’s not something that can be deemed to be any sort of conspiracy as matches ending in a draw at eighty minutes are out of the control of either the RFL or IMG. But they must be somewhat relieved by what we can reveal. We decided to reconstruct the Super League table based on results after eighty minutes and this is what we found. Look at the bottom of the table!

 

Our conclusions are:

1.   Stop wasting money on this relationship with IMG

2.   Only use Golden Point in knock-out matches. Personally, we would prefer when it is used to see two ten minute periods and only tries can be scored. If none occur then there should be a replay.

3.   Put in place structures in the governance of Rugby League that ensure that there is a voice for both fans and players when rule and structural changes are being made.

 

High score losses

As kick-off was approaching last Sunday we got a message from a fellow Fev fan asking us whether the loss against Swinton (40-42) at the beginning of June had the highest number of points Fev had ever scored at home and lost! Intrigued by the question we set about using our databases to try and find the answer. But we wanted to go a bit further and look at similar occurrences for all clubs. Unfortunately, although we have the records for every match Fev have played, our database for all clubs only goes back to 1996 but we were able to get help from colleagues in the Rugby League Record Keepers’ Club, so we were able to put together a full list of matches in which the losing side had scored at least 40 points. But then we decided to change the criterion from ‘lost’ to ‘not won’ so as to include any high scoring draws but there have only been two draws that matched the ’40 point’ criterion.

We were pretty amazed to find that there were 29 matches in which this had happened, three of which involved Fev. And that match against Swinton was not the highest score by a Fev team without winning.

What we were not surprised about was that the furthest back in time for such a match was 1994 because, over time, scoring has become considerably greater. Back in the day Fev were involved in eight 0-0 draws!

Here is the full list of the 29 matches. 

As you can see, Featherstone Rovers appear in the chart five times, 3 times as losers and twice as winners.