fevnut's musings 2025/#24: York, Barrow and Why SL is impossible for Small Clubs now

 

We were thoroughly depressed at the outcome of the match last Sunday. We were well and truly beaten although the final score didn’t fully reflect what we deserved.

After a poor start to 2025 which saw York lose their first three Championship matches, which included a 50-4 drubbing at Oldham, they have steadily improved and have now won 9 of their last ten Championship matches. The one loss was, of course, was at the hands of Fev and that was by a 2-point margin and even then, it was only Ben Reynold’s goal kicking that secured Fev’s win, the teams having scored 4 tries a piece.

During Sunday’s game we thought that it was yet another 2025 poor performance by our team but having watched it again on the video we have realised that disappointment had clouded our judgment, and we were considerably better than we had thought at the time. It was less of a poor performance by us and a very, very good performance by York.

York’s forwards consistently made far more yards in carries than our pack managed, their passing was better, and their attack was more incisive that we could muster.

We have watched every Fev match this year. Mostly in person but, on the few occasions we have been unable to get to an away match, we have watched the full matches on video.

It is our perception that York’s performance on Sunday was the best we have seen this year by any Championship side. They now lie in 2nd place in the table, just two points behind Toulouse. If York continue to play like they did on Sunday we would expect them to finish in the top two and, bearing in mind Toulouse’s tendency to lose games unexpectedly, we would not be at all surprised if York ended up finishing the season in top place.

One thing that really pleased us was to see Ryan Hampshire kicking yet another 40/20. Just a pity that we were unable to capitalise on it this time.

 

 

Barrow

Barrow have been the surprise package this year. We commented previously this year that all the pundits predicted that they would be in the bottom four come the end of the year, but those predictions look to be very misplaced. With 16 rounds of games now played they have been in a play-off position every week.

How we perform this week will be crucial because, if we lose, it looks as if making it into the top 6 will become very difficult indeed. Making a prediction of what is likely to happen on Sunday is really difficult because of the strange results we have seen in this year’s championship.

Taking a look at results in June for Fev, Barrow and Hunslet illustrates that and is really hard to explain.

How on earth does that happen? We had an excellent win up at Barrow, and then just scraped a rather undeserved win at home to Hunslet a fortnight later. Another week later Barrow go to Hunslet and thrash them!

We need to see a performance from the Fev team akin to that we showed up at Barrow and in the 1895 cup semi-final at Oldham and for Barrow to have another lapse like the one that led to them losing at home to Sheffield three weeks ago, seven days after we beat them.

 

League Express Readers Poll

Those of you who regularly read League Express will be aware that they run weekly readers polls. This is the latest.

At the moment Bradford have received the highest number of votes! That’s despite the fact that Odsal is not even fit to be a Championship venue let alone one in Super League. We can only presume that all the Super League fans who will have voted for them are unaware of how awful Odsal is nowadays.

Sadly, the team with the lowest vote is Fev.

We voted and our vote went to neither Bradford nor Fev. There are a number of reasons why we didn’t vote for Fev. Of course, we would love to see Fev in the top rank of rugby league BUT we fear that such a move would put our club in big peril. We are far from being ready, and our finances over the last few years suggest that if we did get ‘invited’ into Super League it could lead to disaster. It is clear that in the current setup being promoted into the ‘élite’ could well lead to bankruptcy which has come very close for several clubs that have been there.

Another reason is that Championship matches are much better to watch than Super League games.

Over the years since the inception of Super League it has changed so much that now it is virtually impossible to survive unless you have a multi-millionaire owner who is prepared to put unbelievable sums of money into a club. And, even then, a club can be put at big risk by such an owner deciding that the time has come to withdraw their support. You need to look no further than Salford to see the awful situation that can arise.

We do hope the day will come when sensible changes are made to the structure of professional rugby league that will enable clubs like Featherstone Rovers to have an opportunity to compete for a place at the top table with a realistic chance of being able to compete.

It wasn’t always like this and when we have posted this this we will develop our next edition of fevnut’s quiz questions looking at the clubs that have previously moved up and down the tiers during the ‘Summer Era’.