fevnut's musings 2024/#34: Another Bloody Sunday, Ben Reynolds and London Broncos injustice

  

Sheffield

Usually, in our weekly ‘musings’ column we comment about the performance of the team in our last match. This time we are not going to do so for two reasons. So much of what we have written about some other games this year applies equally to the game against Sheffield and , frankly, we don’t want to think about it because it is so very depressing.

Instead, we thought we would relate the emotions and thought the match generated. As we drove down Post Office Road on our way home a great film and a superb television programme (both from many years ago) came to mind.

The film was ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ which arrived in cinemas back in 1971. It was a great film starring Glenda Jackson, Murray Head and Peter Finch and directed by John Schlesinger. It deservedly won many awards and was nominated for four Oscars. It dealt with subject matter that was rarely considered in those days. But it wasn’t the film itself we were thinking about but it’s title!

And as we got to the traffic lights at the bottom of Post Office Road we recalled that there was a great Yorkshire Television documentary that had far more relevance to the way we were feeling. The programme was called ‘Another Bloody Sunday', and it followed Doncaster Rugby League Club through a season in which they lost every league match until finally winning their very last one.

If you haven’t seen it, you should watch it. It’s available on youtube, just press CTRL and click on the link below.

 (1) Another Bloody Sunday - YouTube

It contains some excellent footage of one of Doncaster’s games against Fev and for those of you of a certain age who have been involved with Wakefield Council or Wakefield District Labour Party, you might well recognise Doncaster’s opposition coach when they played against Rochdale Hornets. He never played for Fev although his brother, son and grandson did.

This week’s match is on Saturday and we are very confident of a Fev win but, should the unimaginable happen, at least it won’t be another bloody Sunday this week!!

Ben Reynolds

Back at the end of August, we wrote about the goal-kicking of Ben Reynolds, and since then he still hasn’t missed a kick. Many people have asked us how close he is to Liam Finn’s record and we have also heard other people getting the facts about it wrong.

In 2012 Liam set a new world record by kicking 41 successive successful goal attempts. We remember, so well, the scene when he completed that record at Keighley with the home crowd and Premier Sports commentators being bemused by the fact that Liam’s kicks were getting louder cheers than the actual tries. It was quite a funny spectacle as the rest of the Fev team were so keen to help Liam get the record that they did everything possible to try and avoid scoring wide-out. Even with their determination to score as close as possible to the posts we still managed to win by 60-12.

Liam’s run came to an end two days later whilst playing for Ireland against England Knights. The Irish team only scored one try and that was just inside the touchline and Liam missed the kick. In Fev's next match he kicked his first attempt but missed his second so his purely Fev record is actually 42.

We need to distinguish between two aspects of Liam’s record which seems to be confusing people. He kicked 41 successive goal attempts, all playing for Fev, but that world record applies to ALL kicks a player has taken and includes kicks that may have been taken for any team. That makes no difference to Liam’s record which has never been beaten although three players have subsequently equalled it.

The situation with Ben Reynolds is more complicated because he has played for Fev, Hull KR and Hull FC this season.

His run of successful kicks for Fev starts back on April 14th away at Doncaster. The first Fev try in that match was scored by Connor Jones, but Ben was in the sinbin at the time and Danny Addy missed the conversion. Ben returned to the pitch and then kicked a conversion in the 10th minute and a penalty in the 12th. Connor Jones scored another try in the 37th minute and Ben missed the conversion. After that Fev scored 5 more tries and Ben converted them all, so, at the end of that match he had 5 in succession.

Ben then went off and played for the two Hull clubs. For Hull KR he kicked 1/1 and then, on loan at Hull FC kicked 14/17 including missing his last two so his progress towards the world record has to start again when he came back to Fev.

Since then, he has kicked 31/31 which is still ten short of that world record.

However, the Fev record stands with Liam Finn’s 42 and, for just Fev, Ben has kicked 36/36, just 6 successful kicks behind Liam.

One further point we would like to make, and it is only anecdotal. We may be wrong, but we think that Ben has kicked rather more conversions from the touchline than Liam did in his record-making run.

Liam Finn’s contribution to Fev must rank as amongst the very best in the summer era. But, despite that run in 2012, and the fact that he holds the Fev record for goals in a season, he wasn’t a really top notch goal kicker. His record for all the clubs he played for is a kicking success rate of 75% whereas Ben’s record stands at 78%.

 

London Broncos

Whenever we watch a match we have in our mind which team we want to win. Just occasionally we find ourselves in the impossible position of wanting both teams to lose (matches between Wigan and Cas!). This coming weekend there are two super league matches where we have very decided favourites. In the Hull FC v Catalans game we definitely want to see Catalans win and would like it to be by a very big margin. In the match between Warrington and London Broncos we would love to see London win but recognise that is incredibly unlikely so we hope it ends up being close.

That’s because we have been appalled by the way that the Broncos have been treated and we would love to see them avoiding bottom place thus putting egg on the faces of IMG and the RFL.

Hull FC, however, deserve to finish bottom and we fear that the way they have carried on this year, safe in the knowledge that their IMG ‘A’ rating means that they couldn’t be relegated, not even if they had lost every game by at least 50 points. Those clubs with ‘A’ ratings have carte blanche to spend a season with a total lack of effort to provide their fans with good effort.

And there is another issue here. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a draw in a league competition. We have them in the Championship, League One, and all the soccer leagues so why do we have the nonsense of ‘golden point extra time’ in the Super League? And if that idiotic rule wasn’t in place, London Broncos would be two points clear of Hull FC and Hull would have to make a huge effort to beat Catalans on Sunday to avoid any chance of finishing in bottom place because the Broncos have played out two creditable draws this season only to have the competition point snatched away from them in a ‘dropgoalathon’.