The Phantom Horseman

It was Sam Houghton who sent Roberts off. But I agree with your comment, it's bad enough getting carded for dissent at any time but if you've lost your temper with the ref in the first 5 minutes of a game that's really unprofessional.

Reynolds is in the HKR 21-man squad for their game in Catalans on Saturday evening (as is Aydin), though whether he makes the trip might be another matter. BUT...he's received a 2-game ban for "Grade C Foul and Abusive Language towards the Match Official". Which means he'll be unavailable for Whitehaven away and Halifax at home.

The second half of the Widnes game is worth a watch (Fax have put the full game up on YouTube) for the comedy effect as the Fax commentator tries to make sense of his team conceding try after try, eventually the narrative he decides upon is that Thaler has given Fax nothing, and once he decides that, it's a fun ride for the last 20 minutes or so, there's some Liz Truss-class victimhood going on there. I've noticed a few times before on artificial pitches that one team can take over a game out of the blue, I think Widnes scored on 4 consecutive sets without Halifax touching the ball at one stage, they definitely had a couple of favourable bounces of the ball but also played some good stuff too. They certainly have more shape in attack than we do on the evidence of that game and the concern is that their strength looks to be on the left hand side (where Gilmore plays) as it seems to be for so many of the better Championship teams, certainly Wakefield and Bradford, and we'll need to be better than we have on that side to keep them in check. They have a bit more size in the middle this year having added Kirk and Murray. I think they still have a fair bit to prove and it's early days to suggest they can maintain their current high-flying position as they had a similar start last year. They did win at Bradford though and look sure to pose us much more of a test than Doncaster - I've watched that game back again and if Doncaster play like that regularly they'll be in a relegation battle for sure and I wouldn't be getting carried away with that game because they were pretty dreadful. Hopefully now we are getting some of our forwards back we should be able to get the better of the field position battle. It will be interesting to see if Turner can have a similar impact to last week, that was by some way his best game for us so far and he linked up really well with Brad Day. If he can cause the same problems for the better defences he'll be amongst the best half backs in the division. Presumably Reynolds will be available to us again and he might be with us for a few weeks at least if things go well until Lacans returns. Addy has had a couple of quiet games the last 2 weeks after playing a few stormers so it will be interesting to see if he can bounce back to his early-season form. Hopefully with being on an unbeaten run Widnes will bring a fair few over.

I didn't like to say that, partly because to be honest I don't think Lacans or Springer would be selected either unless several players are unavailable. But the point that three or four of the best French-qualified players in the Championship don't play for Toulouse is a pertinent one.

For the people who are complaining about there being no Toulouse players available, which eligible players in the Toulouse squad do you think should be selected? Marcon and Marion played in the last game against England (the 64-0 defeat) but neither are anywhere near international class really. Maybe Belmas but he's not really up to the standard either. If Championship players are selected you'd think it would be more likely to be players like Cozza or Jouffret.

Along the lines of: "we've had a couple of chats here and there, but I thought he showed a couple of positive signs there, and he's been rewarded for making some good choices and good decisions over the last couple of weeks, hopefully he puts the two together and stays in the team." Basically sounded like Ford was happier with him over the last couple of weeks than he had been previously, always worth remembering we only see what's happening on the field but not at training etc.

To be fair plenty of our fans were saying the same about Bradford last week! I do think when we're assessing our performance we have to take into account how the opponents played, and Doncaster were pretty dreadful yesterday in my opinion, their coach said their completion rate was 50% and if that's correct it's no wonder we were so dominant. I think sometimes there's a "good" time to play certain opponents, I think Bradford got that last week when we had had 3 brutal games against Wakefield (twice) and Leigh, as well as the players missing through injury (which they had too). Doncaster for me played much worse than they did against Wakefield last week, and presumably against Sheffield the week before when they would have beaten the Eagles barring a couple of shocking mistakes from kicks. Still, it was terrific to get such a convincing victory after a pretty shakey start (I thought we were moderate for much of the first half if I'm honest but much better in the 2nd half) and interesting to heard Fordy say there might be more players returning next week - Massey and Tanner perhaps? Ford's interviews are really worth listening to closely as you can tell quite a lot from what he says and the way he says it. For instance the comments on Wynne are quite revealing about why he might not have played much lately but also why he might have earned his place back.

Turner Day Jones

Trylights already up on YouTube

Fev get back on the horse with a wide-margin win at Doncaster. Eight changes from last weekend including returns from injury/suspension for Springer, Day, Bussey and it ended up a fairly comfortable win, though I'm not sure how much we can glean from it as Doncaster were really poor despite having eight ex-Fev players in their line-up. Oustanding performance from Paul Turner who really looked the part today, something positive seemed to happen every time he had the ball and he set up at least 4 tries. Will surely be a much tougher test next week against an in-form Widnes team who thrashed Halifax today.

Am going to hold off with my MOM for now but I'll be surprised if 2 names don't feature in just about every list with one of them a runaway winner.

Doncaster have I believe 10 ex-Fev players on the books...5 are starting, 3 on the bench, one is 18th man and the other is injured.

deleted - duplicate post.

I haven't seen the incident but there's no excuse for players not knowing they can't do that these days, there have been plenty of high-profile incidents. The grading for "Makes unnecessary contact with a Player who is or may be injured" is either E or F and thus an automatic referral to the tribunal, and the suspension range for Grade E offences is four to six games.

Nine ex-Fev players in the Doncaster squad, you can be pretty sure they'll be up for this one.