fevnut's blog

  

     Fev and Bradford have now both published their squads for Sunday. We find it quite difficult to see the potential shape of the teams in the form in which the clubs publish the squads so we just have to use guesswork, along with the squads in their last match, to set them out in the traditional manner running from fullback to loose forward and then subs. 

      We don’t leave matches early because Fev are losing by a big margin. We noticed that plenty of Fev supporters did so, and we are not going to criticise them. In fact, we did, for a moment, think about joining them but decided we wouldn’t depart from our long-held principle. It was a thoroughly depressing performance. In February 2023 Fev beat Halifax for the ninth time in a row but then, a month later they beat us by 4 points in the Challenge Cup and in August they beat us again, this time by 3 points, in a Championship match at The Shay. Last year we again did the double over them. You have to go back some way to find a match in which Halifax got a big win. That was in the Big Bash of 2016. Last Sunday our defence was awful. But hard work by the players and coaching staff can usually fix up the defence. What was more depressing was our attack. We managed one really good pass to Derrell Olpherts which he finished very well and our only other try came from a very luc...

               First time this year that we have had this referee although we did have him 5 times last year. Over the last few seasons he has been consistently very near to the top of the table for highest average number of penalties awarded in each game and he is up there again in 2025.

     Head Coach: Brian Noble   We suspect that the appointment of Brian Noble as head coach of Bradford in 2025 took may people by surprise because it was assumed that his work in such a role had finished many years ago. In all the years that we have been writing little profiles of opposition head coaches, both in fevnut’s blog and earlier in the Rovers match day programme, we don’t think we have ever before, done it for a coach with so many honours to his name. While he was Bradford head coach between 2001 and 2006 they were Grand Final winners in 2001, 2003 and 2005, they won the Challenge Cup in 2003 and won the World Club Challenge in 2002, 2004 and 2006. His coaching career also included time as head coach at Wigan, Crusaders RL and Salford as well as being the head coach of the Great Britain team from 2004 until 2006. In 2004 he received the International Federation award as the coach of the year. As a player, he was the Bradford Northern hooker from 1979 until...