fevnut's musings 2025/#10: Sheffield, Catalans and Miscellany

  

This week we have to start with an apology to our regular readers. We have had to spend a large amount of time in the last week on matters that have nothing to do with rugby league so we are only able to produce a very brief ‘musings’ column.

 

 

Mindful of the players we had available for selection we arrived at the game thinking that it was rather improbable that we would win the match. And so it proved to be the case. What turned out to be galling, with our inability to field two proper halfbacks, was that Sheffield’s pair had very good games and largely controlled the match. We are absolutely convinced that, had they been playing for Fev, we would have won quite easily.

It hurts all the more bearing in mind that both of them have played for Fev in the past and Morgan Smith has a huge Fev heritage.

 

Of course, Cory Aston also has some Fev Heritage in so far as his dad, Mark, played for Fev in 1994 and 1995 but that was a very different matter to the wonderful career of Peter Smith.

 

Catalans

Even though Catalans have been a super league club ever since they were invited to join in 2006, Saturday will be their fifth meeting with Fev, four of them being in Perpignan and just the one in Fev. Some of you who looked at our ‘Past Matches against Catalans Dragons’ page might have been surprised to see one of the matches categorised as a league match. It was in the Qualifier 8s in 2017 and we count the Super 8s matches as league games because the results were tabulated in a league table.

Although Fev have lost all five meetings only the first one in 2017 was by a big margin (12-70). There have been some notable performances in defeat, particularly in 2015, when Catalans only managed to win by 3 points in Perpignan against a Fev team included three débutants, one of which was Luke Cooper.

We hope that we will do as least as well this time but that looks unlikely!

 

Miscellany

Following an operation, it looks as if Ben Reynolds will be out for quite some time. That makes it really desperate that we manage to bring someone in who is a proper halfback to cover for his absence. Our next two Championship games are against Halifax, who have won all their first three league matches and Bradford who look as if they have the strongest squad.

This year, the bottom four teams in the Championship go into a new Super 8s competition with the top four League One side to decide on the teams in the two leagues in 2026 with the Championship reduced to 12 teams and League One increased to twelve. Currently, we are just one place above the bottom four and, if we lose to both Halifax and Bradford we are likely to find ourselves in the Super 8 places.

 

Earlier this week we saw a quote from Danny McGuire, Cas Tigers head coach that really made us laugh. He said, “We need to be thicker in the middles”. NO COMMENT!

 

We had planned to write a few words about the upcoming RFL strategic review but that will wait until next week when we have had more time to think about it.

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.