This weekend will be a big one for Championship and League One clubs.
There are five Championship clubs that will do battle with their Super League counterparts on Saturday and Sunday.
And of course this weekend will see the start of the new Betfred League One season, with five matches taking place on Saturday and Sunday.
The Championship’s Challenge Cup interest will begin on Saturday afternoon at 2.00pm, when Sheffield Eagles will take on Hull FC at Featherstone’s Millennium Stadium at the same time as Whitehaven take on St Helens in West Cumbria, with the latter game being broadcast live by The Sportsman website.
What a shame for the Eagles supporters that their stadium in the Steel City isn’t yet able to host the club’s home matches! It means that their fans will be heavily outnumbered and outshouted by the Hull fans at Featherstone and, given the sometimes acrimonious relationship between Sheffield and their hosts this Saturday, I’m not sure that many Featherstone fans (those who don’t travel to the South of France) will turn up to support their Championship rivals.
Whitehaven are likely to have much greater support when they take on St Helens at the same time at the LEL Arena (more commonly known as the Recreation Ground). It’s the first time St Helens will have visited Whitehaven since 2001, so if it’s true that scarcity adds value, then there should be a great turnout of supporters from both sides, hopefully with a large contingent of St Helens supporters making the journey through the Lake District in the early springtime, when the scenery on that journey is perhaps at its most breathtaking.
At 3.00pm on the same day, Leigh Centurions will head to Hull Kingston Rovers for a clash that, to many people’s surprise, won’t be televised live.
If any game has the potential to produce a shock result, this is one of the prime contenders.
Leigh have lots of players in their ranks with Super League and NRL experience, including the hugely impressive Nene Macdonald, while the Robins have given opportunities to many players who have come out of the Championship. Both teams have the potential to play exciting rugby and the result will be an interesting gauge of the gap – assuming there is one – between Super League and the higher reaches of the Championship.
And at 3.30pm the Catalans Dragons will host the ambitious Featherstone Rovers, with Brian McDermott taking his Super League aspirants to the Stade Gilbert Brutus, where they will face a massive test of their resilience against opponents from a higher level.
Again, it’s a shame that we won’t be able to see this game live on television, because it will surely tell us a lot about Rovers’ readiness to transform themselves into a Super League club.
The final Championship club to get underway this weekend in the Challenge Cup will be Barrow Raiders, who remain undefeated in all competitions since gaining promotion from League One last year.
The Raiders will face Huddersfield Giants in a match that kicks off on Sunday at 4.30pm, with the live action broadcast by the BBC at 4.30pm.
Barrow have done an incredible job promoting a renewed interest in the club this year and I sincerely hope they are rewarded with a terrific attendance on Sunday afternoon and that they can take the Giants all the way. It may be too much to think that they can win, but I’m sure they can give a performance that will make their supporters proud of them and that will reinforce their ambition for the rest of the season.
Meanwhile Betfred League One will begin on Saturday with London Skolars hosting Hunslet at the New River Stadium at 3.00pm. The Skolars have had some ups and downs in pre-season, losing in the Challenge Cup at home to Hunslet Club Parkside, so on the face of it, a game against Hunslet looks like an away banker.
There are then four fixtures the following day, with the clash between Oldham – who also lost to an amateur club, in their case Lock Lane, in the Challenge Cup – taking on Keighley in a game that will be televised by OurLeague.
But the pick of the games is probably the one between the ambitious Rochdale Hornets and the equally ambitious North Wales Crusaders at the Crown Oil Arena.
The Crusaders were the last League One club left standing in the Challenge Cup and I can see this game being a genuine thriller.
Get there if you can!
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