01 May 2022

Widnes suffered a brutal mauling at the hands of high flying Rovers who for most of the game were scoring at a rate of a point per minute. Although it took Rovers nine minutes to open the scoring Widnes barely touched the ball, pinned back through goal line drop outs forced by the eager kick chasers driving the catchers back over the whitewash. Once the breakthrough came, Craig Hall scooting from dummy half, the avalanche of points started to gain momentum. Jack Bussey went through off Ryley Jacks’ short pass before John Davies charged onto Hall’s pass and shrugged tacklers off on a 15 metre run. Then Morgan Smith scored two in two minutes, backing up Bussey and Hall’s combination break, then taking Luke Briscoe’ pass after Davies’s kick was spilled. Hall’s perfect conversion rate, which carried on for Fev’s first eleven tries, put them 30-0 up inside the first half hour, and it didn’t stop there. Connor Jones backed up Mark Kheirallah’s break from half-way and Briscoe walking in at the corner off Jesse Sene-Lefao’s pass to send Rovers into the break with an unassailable 42-0 lead.

It took them only seven further minutes to go past fifty, Joey Leilua taking Sene-Lefao’s short pass near the line before the scorer turned provider with a neat 30 metre kick to the line, where Briscoe won the race to register his second before Vikings skipper Matty Smith was rewarded with a fortunate bounce off the post for Matt Fozard to score. Steve Tyrer converted but that was all they could manage as Rovers came at them again. Briscoe took a long, high pass of Smith to race clear and step inside the defenders for his hat-trick, and Sene-Lefao raced in from 20 metres off a Briscoe-Leilua combination. At 66-6 Rovers seemed to take a rest and experiment with interchanges, and the Vikings found some fight before two late tries from Bussey and Hall, with uncharacteristic missed conversions from the latter, moved the score past seventy.