Explore the History and Heritage of Featherstone Rovers
Statistics
When he became club secretary in 1955, Ron Bailey began to put together the first ever compilation of results and scorers of every Featherstone Rovers match. He published his work as The History of Featherstone Rovers in 1956. The club records at that time were incomplete as the Pontefract & Castleford Express archives were also incomplete for a number of seasons in the 1930s. Irvin Saxton stepped in and offered to try and complete the list and by using other sources he managed to fill the blanks.
When the Rovers work was done, Irvin went on to form the Rugby League Record Keepers Club in 1972. Up until 1994 the RKC set about the Herculean task of collating all the scorers and teams from every single Rugby League match ever in the UK, with members scouring newspaper archives and microfilm at libraries for each club. These were then cross-checked to create a complete record of the whole sport. A lot of the work on the collation of Featherstone's Teams & Scorers lists was done by Richard Cooper of Ackworth.
Recently, the Record Keepers Club was reformed to digitalise and check all the original work, putting everything on to databases for online access, which was another mammoth task.
This database covers every official match of Featherstone Rovers. Official games do not include friendlies, pre-season warm ups, charity matches. Nor do they include reserve team matches or junior games from before 1921. Appearances are clearly marked as full appearances (the starting 13) and substitute appearances. Non-playing substitutes do not count but are named, where known, with an asterisk.
From 1921 to 1983, a try was worth three points. From 1983 onwards, four points.
From 1921 to 1973, a drop-goal was worth two points. From 1973 onwards, one point.
On this website, the statistical history is divided principally into three sections.
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Click on the heading and you will find a season summary, a hypothetical "Dream Team" for each season and relevant statistics about the year, all the matches played, with dates and results.
Click on the heading and you will find, organised by years, match reports and the team line up of every game. We have used a variety of sources. The Pontefract and Castleford Express, Irvin Saxton’s own records, the British Newspaper Archive, and more recently online reports. This is a huge undertaking and will not be completed for some time. Any help with match clippings or reports would be greatly appreciated.
Click on the heading for a season-by-season list of which players played in a year, how many games they players, and the tries and goals they scored.
Unfortunately records relating to Rovers' time as a junior club before 1921 are incomplete and with very few data sources it is unlikely these will ever be complete. Nevertheless a lot of research was done by Ian Clayton into this period and with Ian's permission some of his research has been included on this site.