fevnut's blog

  The Fev and Sheffield have 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. 

  It seems strange to think that when we were writing ‘musings’ last week we were oblivious to the fact that we would be turning up to this match with a change of the Fev head coach from James Ford to Paul Cooke. It can’t have been easy for Paul to go into his first match in his new role with only a few days to prepare the team, even though he had been working with them for a few months already as assistant coach. It also made it difficult when he was faced with picking a team without any first-choice half-backs (more of that later). Thankfully, we were playing opponents from League One who had had a very poor start to the season, had lost their match the week before 44-0 to Rochdale, and were going in to this match with a caretaker coach also taking charge for the first time. We were pleased to see our change, having got been exasperated by both the style we were playing and the fact that James Ford had presided over too many games when Fev lost a match that we definitely ...

   

    Head Coach:  Craig Lingard   It feels strange not to be writing about Mark Aston in this section! He had been the Sheffield Eagles head coach from 2000 to July 2024 with just one year out when he became the Eagles Chief Executive for 2006 and Gary Wilkinson was the head coach for that year. Now, in 2025, it is Craig Lingard. Craig was the head coach at Keighley from 2017 to May 2019. He then became head coach at Batley from 2020 to 2023 and Castleford in 2024. His entire playing career was at Batley from 1998 to 2008. He played 205 games, almost always at fullback, for them and scored 142 tries which is the all-time record for the club. After retiring as a player he became an assistant coach at Batley, a position he occupied from 2009 until 2016 apart from one year (2012) when he went to be head coach at Bramley Buffaloes.   Captain: Joel Farrell   Joel Farrell has been appointed as the Sheffield Eagles captain for 2025, succeeding An...

            Started refereeing in 2022 but his first Fev match was last year when he took charge of 4 of our games.