fevnut's musings 2025/#28: London Broncos, Batley and League Structure Changes

 

This year we have had matches where Fev have played really well and matches where we have been very poor. And last Sunday we got both in the same match!

It was, apparently, the late great Jimmy Greaves who first said that “football is a game of two halves”. Well, what we watched last Sunday wasn’t football, but the sentiment was totally apt. 12-4 down at halftime and being decidedly outplayed by this rejuvenated London Broncos team.

We have often wished that we could sneak in invisible to the Rovers dressing room at halftime, In retrospect, we would very much like to have heard just what Paul Cooke told the team at halftime. Whatever it was, it worked! During the second half they played as well, if not better, than in any other match this year!

Difficult to put that down to any particular players, but we will name six who clearly made big contributions to the win.

Caleb Aekins was rock solid at the back and contributed two excellent tries. Particularly delightful was the second try which came off an exquisite Ryan Hampshire chip over the Broncos defence for Caleb to collect and score. We love it when a player spots an opportunity and then executes it so perfectly. Well done Rocky for the chip.

Ben Reynolds led the team around the field and was also excellent in defence. And talking of defence, the Connor Wynne tackle that prevented a try under the sticks was fantastic. We were about to write the try down in our notes when we saw the referee indicating, held up. We’ve looked at it several times on the video and still don’t know how Connor Wynne managed to do that.

But, as in every game, it’s not just the backs and halfbacks that make major contributions to success. There are two forwards that, maybe, we haven’t mentioned enough this year. Two forwards that contribute massively. They are King Vuniyayawa and Clay Webb. As it stands at the moment, both of them would be on our shortlist for player of the season.

 

 

Batley Bulldogs

All the evidence from the recent matches of both Fev and Batley point to a Fev win at Batley this weekend.  But, of course, it’s never that simple.

The biggest danger, it seems to us, is not any individual player in the Batley side but rather the canniness of John Kear. There were a few occasions when John Kear teams have pulled off surprising results against us. Two, while he was at Batley were their 21-20 win in the 2013 play-offs and (again a 1 pointer) their 11-10 win in the 2016 Qualifier 8s.

Batley always have an advantage when playing at home by virtue of them knowing how best to play both up and down on that precipitous slope. They really ought to be known as the Batley Mountaineers rather than Batley Bulldogs!

We at Fev also have a slope, but it’s nothing like the one at Mount Pleasant. If you play there regularly you know how to kick and how to pass on it. You know how to use it to pin a defence coming up the mountain into making just a few yards up the slope coming away from their line. You know how to cope with the very tiring business of having to run backwards up the slope at each play-the-ball when you are defending against a team coming up the slope.

We have no doubt that John Kear will have a game plan designed to combat what he must know is an opposition with much more quality than he has at his disposal.

We suspect that there will be a lot of holding down and hope that the referee deals effectively with any such tactic early in the game. We also imagine that they will have noted which Fev players are easily riled and can become hot-headed. We hope that Paul Cooke and Dave Merrick will have made the importance of them keeping calm very clear.

 

Structure Change

Here we go again. An announcement in late July that the structure for 2026 will include a 14 team Super League. What isn’t clear yet is what the implications for the current Championship and League One.

What we find completely unacceptable is the idea that the clubs numbers 13 and 14 will be chosen by a small ‘cabal’ with no idea how they will make their decision. We do note that suggestions have been flying around that Widnes will be one of the clubs considered. That is, frankly, preposterous. A team that has only won 6 out of 17 games in the championship! But then, they must have friends in high places. They were ‘elevated’ to Super League for 2012 after Fev had won the Championship League while Widnes finished 5th and in the two matches between the teams in 2011 Fev beat Widnes 56-16 at home and 44-4 away.

It is incredible how often Rugby League has taken decisions late in a season about the structure for the following year. For a professional sport that looks very amateurish. And let’s not forget that Fev were one of the main clubs to suffer from late changes when they were relegated from the top division at the end of the 1994-95 season when we finished 11th (out of 16) in the top tier after a season when there were 4 clubs to be relegated only for a very late change of plan to relegate 6 clubs to prepare the way for Super League.

Apparently, a large majority of the Super League Clubs voted at a meeting earlier this week for such a change. How on earth did the RFL get itself into a position whereby the Super League clubs decide how many teams should be included. We are not against the idea of a 14 team Super League, but it should be recognised that such a change has big implications for those outside the top tier and in that case the decision should be made in the interest of all professional/semi-professional clubs which certainly shouldn’t be by a vote of the SL clubs.

As it stands at the moment 14 teams in SL will mean 21 teams outside SL. Apparently there is a possible plan to divide those teams into two ‘conferences’ with some sort of play-offs at the end of the season bringing the two conferences together.

We need to see the details but there are definitely merits in such a system if it is organised on a geographical basis. If done properly it would lead to higher attendances at away matches and cut down on the travel costs for both the clubs and their supporters.

The fact is that many clubs are suffering financially as the central funding has been reduced (drastically reduced for League One Clubs) as a result of the lousy last television deal and the way it was dealt with protecting the Super League Clubs at the expense of all the rest.

We have often heard fans arguing that the Championship and League One clubs should breakaway from the Super League dominated RFL but before that happened it would be essential for a new television deal to be negotiated for what (for the moment) we will call Championship and League One clubs that would bring in enough money to support the clubs but sadly we just can’t see that happening any time soon.

We all know what a good competition the Championship is but the problem is that it just isn’t recognised elsewhere.

So, for now, we will wait to see what is going to be suggested for the structure below Super League and then return to this subject at a later date.