fevnut's musings 2025/#02: Fev v Goole, Greg Eden and 'What's the probability?'

  

Back at Post Office Road (Millennium Stadium)

 

After what had felt like an interminable off-season, it felt really good to be sitting in our seat in the main stand and watching a Fev team playing.

As we had explained last week, we only really go to these games in order to get to know out new players. From that point of view, it turned out to be a bit of a failure. Because the new shirts hadn’t arrived, they were playing in old shirts and the numbers on their backs bore no relationship to the numbers on the team sheet. That made it impossible to identify players, so we made very little progress in getting to recognize the newcomers. For a time, we even had both Fev wingers wearing No. 5!

On paper it looked as if Goole had managed to assemble a pretty good squad so we should be buoyed by the fact that we were able to easily dominate them.

But as so often happens, the constant changes made it feel like the momentum got completely lost and, quite frankly, it turned into a bit of a bore in the second half.

There were some impressive performances, and we thought that Toby Boothroyd and Zach Herring made an impressive start to their Fev careers. 

We could end up having a very strong second row pairing with Boothroyd and Brad Day. If Ben Reynolds, Thomas Lacans and Zach Herring are all fit it will be interesting to see who gets to make the halfback pairing when the league campaign begins against Doncaster next month.

We also thought that Maddox Jeffrey was quite impressive, particularly with the tackle on Manoa Wacokecoke in the second half when it looked as if Manoa was going to go the full length of the pitch after an interception. Not sure how much game time he will get when he is competing for a starting position against Derrell Olpherts, Gaz Gale and Connor Wynne but we should remember he is only 19 (he turns 20 in a couple of weeks) and shows a lot of promise for the future. Let’s hope we can keep him which is always difficult when there are no ‘A’ teams.

Greg Eden 

Earlier this week the club announced that Greg Eden, who had earlier been listed as a member of our 2025 squad, had left. It wasn’t the greatest of surprises because last year his heart didn’t seem to be fully in it when playing for either Halifax or Fev.

That shouldn’t cloud the issue over a remarkable career in which he scored 156 tries. To put that into context, only two current members of the Fev squad have scored half that number in their careers thus far, Derrell Olpherts (121), and Gareth Gale (78).

Greg had an amazing season in 2017 when he scored 41 tries in 31 games and he achieved the amazing feat of scoring hat tricks in four successive matches. One of those was against Leigh and he accomplished the hat trick in a space of 5 minutes, scoring in the 34th, 36th and 38th minutes. It is believed to be the fastest hat trick ever in the professional game.

 

 

What’s the probability?

Having studied statistics at ‘A’ level and university we are often amused when people invent conspiracy theories around events which are not unlikely to randomly occur.

When we went into teaching it was quite common to have a tutor group in which there were two pupils with the same birthday.

Three in a group of 27 is very unexpected but that is the situation in the 2025 Fev squad. Last Monday was the birthday of Danny Addy, Ben Reynolds and Connor Wynne!

The flags above represent all the nations that, under current rugby league rules, members of the 2025 Fev squad have played for, or are eligible to play for.