T'Other Side: Batley Bulldogs

Head Coach: Mark Moxon

 

Following Craig Lingard’s move to Castleford Tigers for the 2024 season, Mark Moxon moved up from assistant coach to head coach for the Bulldogs. He had been assistant coach at Batley for the last 12 seasons.

His playing career was as a halfback or hooker and he made his first grade début with Huddersfield Giants in 1998. He signed for Doncaster in 2003 and Halifax in 2004 and finished his playing career at Hunslet from 2005-2009.

 

 

Captain: Alistair Leak

 

Alistair Leak took over the captaincy from James Brown at the beginning of this season.

He made his professional début with Batley in 2013 has remained ever since, never even going anywhere on loan. This year is his 13th season

He is a hooker and has so far played 252 games and scored 79 tries.

 

Loan players and Dual Registration

In 2025 Batley have a dual reg agreement with Wakefield Trinity and, so far, this year 6 Trinity players have played for them: Noah High (prop), Jayden Myers (centre), Josh Rourke (fullback), Isaac Shaw (prop), Harvey Smith (hooker) and Cain Staveley-Carr (second row).

At the time of writing, they do not have any loan players although Logan Bayliss (prop) and Eliot Peposhi (loose forward), both from Bradford, Sam Marshall (prop) and Luke Thomas (prop), both from Warrington, and Brad Marin (prop/second row) from Leigh have all had loan spells with Batley earlier in the year.

 

 

The Fev connection

 

There is a long history of players who have played for both Batley and Fev. In our database of all Fev players since 1921 there are 127 that we know of who also played for Batley and there will almost certainly be others who we haven’t discovered so far.

Amongst that list are:

Bradford born forward, Albert Fearnley, started out at Rochdale Hornets but we have been unable to find any references to him playing in the first team there. In 1949 he joined Oldham and then he signed for Halifax in 1951 where he was so successful that he became a member of their Hall of Fame. In 1956, at the age of 32, he joined Fev and over two seasons he played 67 games and scored 18 tries, a high try-scoring record for a forward in those days. His last season before retirement was at Batley in the 1958-59 season.

Paul Geary, second row, began his professional career with Wakefield in 1982. He was signed by Fev during the 1986-87 season. In November 1987 he was transferred to Batley where he remained until the end of the 1989-90 season. For Fev he played 30 games and scored 2 tries.

Winger, Jamie Stokes, made his début for Fev as a 16 year-old in 1996. He played mainly for the reserves until 1999. Given an extended run in the first team, he quickly sealed his place and became a regular fixture. Small in stature, Jamie was very fast, very elusive and a prolific try scorer. From 1996 until 2004 Jamie played 196 times for Fev, and scored 117 tries which included 7 hat tricks. Those 117 tries place him in 8th place on the Fev all time top try scorers list.

He was Fev’s top try scorer in the 2000, 2001 and 2003 seasons.

In 2005 he joined Batley and spent 4 years at Mount Pleasant making 69 appearances and scoring 35 tries before retiring at the end of 2008.

Nyle Flynn, who is in the Batley 2025 squad, is the son of Adrian Flynn who played for Fev in 2003.