fevnut's musings 2025/#21: Barrow and WEMBLEY

 

 

Unable to go to Barrow we watched it on the paid for stream by lounges.tv. We don’t be doing that again. Although it settled down later, there were loads of problems with the sound and we lost the stream so many times and spent almost as much time refreshing the connection as actually watching the match.

Why on earth do broadcasters have the referee’s mike on so loud? Most of the commentary that we did get was drowned out by the constant shouting to the players by the referee.

Barrow is always a difficult place to go so congratulations to the team for getting a really good result. And showing further promise for climbing the league table in the coming weeks.

 

WEMBLEEEY!

 

It really is truly amazing that we will see our team from a little place like Featherstone trotting out onto the Wembley pitch for the seventh time on Saturday. For York it will be their third time (but they have lost on both occasions) and down below we show the match details for the previous occasions either Fev or York have played there.

The last time (for both teams) was the 1895 Cup Final in 2021. That was still in the days of the pandemic and for a variety of reasons both teams were well below full strength. You would have expected a first-choice line-up for Fev to have included Ben Blackmore, Jack Bussey, Brad Day, Frankie Halton, Tom Holmes, Connor Jones, Junior Moors, Dean Parata and Kris Welham but none of them were in the line-up. Instead, we had the likes of Jacob Doyle who was playing in only his second professional game and scored two tries and Jake Sweeting slotted in at hooker with both Connor Jones and Dean Parata unable to play. Also missing was head coach, James Webster, and assistant coach, Paul March, had to take charge.

Remarkably, Captain Lockwood was in the team after the most unusual preparation for such a game. If we remember correctly, Captain James boarded the team coach to take the team as would be expected, but when they got to London, he got a message telling them his wife had gone into labour, so it was straight off to Kings Cross, a train back home and he made it in time for the birth. So, you would have thought that we would also be missing James for the final. But no! Having been there for the birth and with everything being fine James set off back to London and duly led out the team at Wembley!

Another amazing fact about the Fev team in that final was that Joe Summers came on from the bench to make his professional rugby league début …. Playing at Wembley!

Fev should have been hot favourites to lift the cup. At the time Fev were lying 2nd in the Championship table and York were down in 11th place. But the nature of the team that Fev had to put out meant that it was difficult to tell how it would go but this photo tells you all. 

One of York’s try scorers that day was Ben Jones-Bishop who scored a hat trick for York last weekend. He recently returned to York from Sheffield Eagles, but he won’t be playing because he is cup-tied having played for Sheffield in an earlier round. For Fev James Glover is similarly cup-tied and loanee Nathan Wilde wasn’t registered for Fev in time to be available for the final.

It is also worth noting that in the York team were Will Jubb, former Fev captain, Tim Spears, and Danny Kirmond along with a little known 20-year old stand-off called Mikey Lewis who was one of their try scorers.

This year we go into the repeat of the 2021 final with York in 4th place and Fev in 8th, but that shouldn’t bother us bearing in mind the way we have been playing recently with four wins on the trot.

For fevnut our biggest worry is combatting the threat of Liam Harris who tore us to shreds in the last league game of 2024. This year he is currently the top try scorer for Championship clubs, top points scorer, second in goals kicked and joint top for drop goals. We are hoping that Paul Cooke, Ged Corcoran and Ian Hardman have devised an effective game plan to combat the threat he poses (without having one of our players sent off for trying to take him out of the game!).

So here we go with the details of all the past Wembley matches involving York and Fev, a history that spans 90 years and involves seven matches.