fevnut's musings 2025/#17: Toulouse, League One Fixture Madness and Paul Sykes

   

Watching our game against Toulouse was a horrible experience. It probably wouldn’t have felt so bad had it followed the games against Halifax and Bradford, but coming after the much-improved performances against Oldham and York, it felt like a shocker.

On the face of it, losing by just eight points to a team as strong as Toulouse shouldn’t have felt that bad, but it was the lack of cohesion in attack that came as such a big disappointment.

In the cold light of day, a few days on from the game, we can see reasons for that. Lacking both Springer and Vuniyayawa left us with a pack that were unable to take any command on the game and that, in turn, largely reduced the opportunities for our halfbacks to create opportunities. That was compounded by the fact that Ben Reynolds obviously wasn’t fit, indicated by the fact that he wasn’t taking the goal kicks. We do wonder whether it was sensible to play him and risk causing him to be out of action for a longer period of time and thus possibly unavailable for matches in which we have a greater chance of winning.

  

League One Fixtures

The League One fixtures are a real mess. There are number of factors that have combined to make it so. First of all, having an odd number of teams in the league (as is currently the case with the Championship also) means that there have to be gaps in the fixture list for each club. The withdrawal of Cornwall has meant even more gaps in the schedule.

We became aware of this when we noticed that Midlands Hurricanes had no game between April 19th and May 11th, a gap of three weeks. We wondered whether this was a particularly unfortunate circumstance or whether there were other League One clubs in the same predicament. We did some analysis and found that every League One club had at least one three week gap and four of the ten actually had a four-week gap in their fixtures between matches. Here’s what we discovered:

 

Dewsbury are one of the clubs with a 4-week gap. This coming weekend (May 4th) they are way to Whitehaven and then their next match is away at Workington on June 1st!

Occasionally a week with no match can be advantageous giving players recovery time and helping to get injured players back but 3 or 4 weeks off means that players will be going into their next game lacking what is known as ‘match’ fitness. Can you imagine the rumpus there would be if a Super League club had to go for 4 weeks without a game!

League One clubs are already having to cope with the large reduction in central funding over the last few years so a big gap between receiving any income from home matches is a really big blow to their cash flow. In Dewsbury’s case they are faced with a six week gap between home matches from playing Rochdale on April 27th until welcoming Goole on June 13th.

That’s no way to run a professional league. The question now is whether the RFL reconsider last year's applications from Bedford Tigers and Anglian Vipers so that one of them can join League One in 2026 and thus bring all three leagues to 12 teams and no bye weeks.

Paul Sykes 

 

This season Paul Sykes is Paul March’s assistant coach at Dewsbury, but he is also, at the age of 43, still registered as a player for them.

Last weekend he played for the first time in 2025 which is now his nineteenth season as a player. An amazing achievement. He made his début for Bradford Bulls, at the age of 17, on July 2nd, 1999, against Wakefield Trinity which makes him the only player still standing to have débuted in the 20th century.

Paul, of course, played for Featherstone Rovers in 2015 when he appeared 34 times (only missing one match all year), scoring 280 points (18 tries and 104 goals).

Probably his most memorable goal was a touchline conversion after the hooter had sounded to give Fev a 28-26 win in that crazy match against Batley when Fev scored 22 points in the last six minutes to come back from a 26-6 deficit.

Congratulations, Paul.

 

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.