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.

   

    Fev and Halifax have both published their squads for Saturday although Halifax have only named 19 players. 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.  With 3 players coming in on dual reg and a new player on loan it is even more difficult than usual to guess the Fev line-up this week!

     Many thanks to those who arranged for the match to be screened in the Rovers Clubhouse. We were pleasantly surprised by both the quality of the pictures and sound, and it was great that there were no interruptions on the feed. It would have been nice to have got a win because Catalans and Acton & Willesden are the only two clubs who we have ever played in official matches to whom we have lost every time. We will never have the chance to set straight our record against Acton & Willesden who only spent the one season (1935-36) in professional rugby league but maybe, one day we will get to record a win, or even a draw, against the Catalans. Realistically, it wasn’t going to happen this time. For a part-time team to compete against a full-time team is always very difficult and taking the field without any proper halfbacks made it nigh impossible. It was great to see Connor Wynne back in the team. And that’s not just for the two great tries he scored. He was also ...

              Now where have we seen this ref before?!  8 previous games taking charge of Fev matches and never used a yellow or red card in any of them. Let's hope our discipline is such that it continues into Sunday's game!