fevnut's musings 2025/#13: Bradford, Promotion and Relegation, Fev's table position and April Fool!

     

A couple of days ago we saw a social media post suggesting that Fev fans who carry on turning up to watch matches, even though the performances have been dire recently, must be masochists.

That simply isn’t true. A masochist is one who derives pleasure from pain and misfortune. We certainly feel the pain of watching Fev, at the moment, but we derive absolutely no pleasure whatsoever from it.

We continue to turn up because we love Featherstone Rovers and the club has given us so much pleasure over the last 50 or so years. We will never abandon them and we continue to go because without fans we would lose the club, and however painful it has been in the last few weeks we continue to be optimistic that it will get better soon.

With any match that we lose, we try to look for some positives. It’s a bit of a struggle to find the positives out of last Sunday’s match!

Nevertheless, here are two.

First, no team is going to perform well without proper halfbacks and we believe that when Ben Reynolds and Ryan Hampshire are fit and have had some game time together we will see a huge improvement in performances.

Second, it is almost exactly twenty years to the day (we’re referring to April 3rd, 2005) when we watched the most humiliating match we have ever seen in our time watching Rovers. Does the date mean anything to you? It was the 4th round of the Challenge Cup and the opposition was also Bradford Bulls. That day remains as the highest number of points ever conceded by a Fev team. The final score was Featherstone 14 Bradford 80. Last Sunday was awful, but it was nowhere near as bad as it was in 2005! With 11 minutes on the clock, Robbie Paul had completed a hat trick! By the end Paul Deacon had converted 11 out of 13 tries and then, to add even more humiliation, their 14th and final try was converted by Joe Vagana!

The mere fact that we have stooped to writing about that match in order to feel a little bit of positivity tells you all you need to know how we felt about the game last week!

 

Promotion and Relegation between Championship and League One

Lying currently in 12th place in the Championship table has understandably seen many Fev fans starting to worry about the possibility of relegation to League One at the end of the season.

What was evident from their postings is that most of them have no idea about how promotion and relegation is decided in 2025. Not surprising that they missed the announcements some time ago, because Fev Fans have become so used to focussing their attention on making it into the play-offs as they have done every year since 2019 (apart from 2020 when Covid brought an end to the Championship season).

Two years ago the RFL decided to change the number of clubs in the Championship and League One so that by 2026 both leagues would have 12 clubs. The process started last year when the bottom two clubs in the table were relegated and there was a play-off match between the team finishing 12^th in the Championship and the winners of the League One play-off. That match resulted in Swinton also being relegated and Hunslet promoted to take their place.

A very different system, however, applies in 2025. Remember the Super 8s from 2015 to 2018? Well, it’s back, albeit in a rather different form. This Super 8s will bring together the bottom 4 teams in the Championship and the top 4 in League One. Each Championship team will play against the 4 from League 1 (2 at home and 2 away) and the League One teams play the Championship teams. There will be a league table and the two clubs finishing in first and second will play in the Championship in 2026. The final match of the season will be a play-off between the teams finishing 3rd and 4th in the Super 8s and the winner of that game will also play in the Championship in 2026.

But today Cornwall have announced they are withdrawing from League One (another expansion failure!) so the RFL are going to have to decide what they will do about that. Maybe we will end up with 12 clubs in the Championship and 11 in League 1 in 2026 or they might decide to have another round of applications to join League 1 like they did with Goole Vikings coming into the league this year.

 

Fev in the lower reaches of the Championship

It’s not surprising that currently lying so low in the table has sent shock waves through Fev fans. We haven’t been that low since we were relegated to National League 2 at the end of 2015.

We thought we would take a look at the lowest positions we have occupied since we came back to the 2nd tier in 2008. In the chart below we have listed the lowest place we have occupied at some point during each season. We have disregarded the table positions during the first three weeks of each year because they give a very false picture.

It confirms what we suspected, in the last 18 years we have never been as low as we are now. 

But there is no reason to despair. We are very confident that we will get back to winning ways soon and, although we may not get into the play-offs, we think that come September we will be well clear of the bottom 4 positions and having to play in the Super 8s.

 

April Fool

Did you see the article on TotalRL on Tuesday. We got the heebie-jeebies until we realised that it was April 1st!

In case you missed it we reproduce it here:

 

 

One of the best since the famous BBC spoof programme on April 1st, 1957 about the spaghetti harvest. If you look it up, you have to remember that, in those days, the only spaghetti Brits knew came in Heinz tins or very rarely in an Italian restaurant but those were few and far between. It worked brilliantly, partly because of the gravitas supplied by using Richard Dimbleby to do the commentary.

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.