The Phantom Horseman

I, too, am wistful for the days when dominant teams such as Wakefield occasionally were shocked to their very core by an astonishing giant-killing result. Am almost embarrassed to admit it, but I'm even old enough to remember this one from the archives...

As an aside, you have to feel a bit of sympathy for Dewsbury with their DR arrangement. Their partner team is Huddersfield and you'd think they might have liked to have played some of the Giants' fringe players such as Fenton Rogers, Aidan McGowan, Connor Carr and Max Wood...but instead it's been a conveyor belt to Bradford with all four playing on loan for the Bulls. Must be very frustrating, that.

No games that we can take for granted this year, we aren't strong enough to be able to under-perform and still win like last year. Dewsbury are bottom of the table at the moment but led Toulouse 19-10 at half time in their last game and were still in front until 16 minutes from the finish. They comfortably beat Batley at home earlier this season and on their best home form they'll give us plenty to think about. Having lost coach Liam Finn to Halifax, they replaced him with another ex-Fev player in Dale Ferguson...who himself stepped aside as coach recently...to be replaced by another man with a very strong recent history at Fev in Paul March. There's little doubt Marchy will have his players well fired up on Sunday. Can't argue with the decision to give the lads the week off last week, it's a long, tough season and there won't be any other chances for a break, let's hope they come back raring to go. As MLP says a few whose status is unknown, we know Gale will be suspended. We're currently in 4th place, not sure we have really played like a top 4 team in a few of our games but we've been getting the job done and hopefully we can do so again.

As others have said, a final which is largely remembered for negative reasons. Murphy's assault on Hartley came less than 2 minutes into the game, a clear elbow to the head, and Shepherd didn't even speak to Murphy. People tend to think that refs were "better in the old days" but what I remember is that in the 1970s the officials seemed to think that being "strong" meant lots of dramatic arm signals to supposedly show how decisive they are being and that's what happened in this incident. If that same incident happened nowadays, there would have been a short consultation between the officials (and perhaps the video ref) and Murphy would have spent the remaining 78 minutes off the field, with a lengthy ban to follow Unfortunately we lost our cool and fell into Murphy's trap, a couple of late pushes after he had kicked the ball saw Murphy rolling around in apparent agony on the floor (as had happened 3 years earlier when he managed to get Syd Hynes sent off), the game became very niggly and scrappy and to be fair Warrington's pack did have the better of it on the day. My other abiding memory is of Murphy sneaking a meaningless drop goal over the bar in the closing stages and repeatedly leaping into the air with both arms aloft as he ran back to his own half, even as a kid I thought this was pathetic! All in all a complete contrast to the joyous rugby we had seen the previous year. Still, we only had to wait another nine years for another golden Wembley moment.

The biggest downside of the 7-tackle set for me is that it seems to discourage expansive play from the attacking side; the mantra seems to be that with 7 tackles you can grind your way upfield without taking too many risks. As this thread is about drop outs though, I agree with the consensus that they seem to offer a poor risk to reward, for me kick offs from the half way line are a better risk/reward option.

Not sure about that. In both cases it's a useful sidestep from first or second receiver that makes them dangerous near the line, and whilst I know they have both played 9 in the past, I think if over a period of time they would both struggle defensively in the middle where they'd have to make 30+ tackles per game and they'd have big props dominating the collision against them all day.

This doesn't make sense, a player that's average at SL level tends to stand out in the Championship. FWIW my view on Morgan Smith is that he has always been a good Championship player who has appealed to a couple of SL teams as a cheap 3rd half back option because he's British and doesn't count on the quota. He doesn't have the creativity in terms of the passing game to be a SL half back, in fact he's a very similar player to Lacans, a dangerous runner near the line with a decent short kicking game and tries hard defensively, my only concern with bringing him back is if it went well does he keep Lacans out of the team when he's fit again? In terms of a long-term signing at half back I think it seems fairly evident that we don't have the finances to do that at the moment, in fact we have done very well to sign Turner when we did.

That's who I thought the previous couple of posts were about! He's, er, filled out a bit hasn't he? I thought Jack Bussey would be the only Fev player I'd ever see make the transition from half back to prop but now I'm not so sure.

I think he should be sacked if they lose a game to Championship opposition in the Challenge Cup too.

That's been the case for some time though. At one point it was massively lopsided (in an attempt to help the higher-finishing clubs to bridge the gap and compete with SL teams in the Middle 8s). Then a few years ago it was announced that they were drastically reducing the differential (from what I remember, it was something like £5k increments per positional finish). I also seem to remember something about payments being linked to turnover or something like that? But I doubt it's being "kept secret" for those reasons - it has historically always been very difficult to find out what the distributions were, whatever the methodology.

Most notably, in central funding. There really hasn't been enough made about the relative drop in funding for lower-league clubs in comparison with SL clubs in recent years. It's not easy to get accurate figures for how much the distribution is at each level as the figures don't seem to be published very often, but from the limited information I have seen it seems like over the last few years SL clubs probably receive about 70% of what they did, say, five or six years ago, whereas high-end Championship teams are at around 20% (and League 1 teams I believe received just £20k). In my opinion, that's why we're seeing a gradual drop in quality in the Championship and why, other than teams with a vastly wealthy owner, there is little prospect of most Championship teams progressing sufficiently to become SL aspirants under the new IMG system, with things like attendances, sponsorship and merchandise sales inevitably falling as the quality on the pitch is reduced.

Gaz Gale has picked up a ban for his sending off, but only for 1 game.

Possibly, I am just speculating but from the outside it looks to me like the relationship has gone sour for whatever reason. Pity they didn't do a straight swap with Hull for Morgan Smith as he would have been a very good fit for us on DR.

These are all good points, but for me the biggest story here is why are Hull KR letting Reynolds go for the rest of the season having paid what was described as a "significant" transfer fee for him around ten weeks earlier? Reynolds himself stated "The club has gone above and beyond to get me here" when they signed him, it's very interesting that having seemingly gone to great trouble and some expense to sign him they are now happy to effectively swap him for a player who returned fairly recently from a very bad long-term injury and who can't get into the Cas team.

Personally I doubt it's money related, especially as they appear to have moved immediately to secure a replacement in Richardson. Reading between the lines of Shaw's piece... "the Black and Whites have signed the Rovers playmaker after he was unexpectedly made available" and "But after making just two appearances for the Craven Park club, a decision has been made to allow him to seek another challenge, which has ultimately emerged at the MKM Stadium."....that makes me wonder if relationships have soured between Reynolds and HKR. It will be interesting to see the wording if and when this is announced by HKR.