Career Record for Featherstone
Appearances			Tries	Goals	Drop Goals	Points
Total	Start	Sub
111	97	14	12	0	0	48

Following in the footsteps of Brendon Tuuta would be a daunting prospect for any loose forward. Joining a club amidst the trauma of enforced demotion from the Super League would be equally onerous. But the hard-working Richard Slater was unfazed by this background noise, and gave four years of solid service to Featherstone Rovers from 1995 to 1999.

Born in Normanton, Slater signed for Wakefield Trinity as a teenager. He quickly made his mark there, playing the Yorkshire Cup final in 1992 and representing Great Britain Under 21s. He played alongside future Rovers player and coach Gary H. Price and also Australian legend Ray Price, who once memorably described young Slater as ‘pound for pound, the best tackler in the league’. He played a total of 134 games at the Belle Vue club, and when he became available, Rovers snapped him up for £50,000. He made his debut on the 1st of November 1995, following in the footsteps of his older brother Martin, who had played hooker for Featherstone in 1986/87. Richard’s first game proved to be an inauspicious event, a midweek game at home to Rochdale during the much disliked Centenary season. Rovers contrived to lose the game 24-16 although Slater did score the only try for Rovers that evening.

From then on, he offered a model of consistency during a turbulent period both for the club and the sport as a whole. His forte was his tackling, a classic round-the-legs technique which very rarely failed him. Defending in the middle, he always got through a lot of work, although not the biggest of forwards. In the first summer season, he missed just two games, and packed down behind a very experienced second-row combination of Roy Powell and Jon Sharp. During the following season, he lost his place following a knee injury, and Danny Evans filled in for the rest of the season so successfully that Slater found it hard to break back into the team. In 1998 he was back as first choice pick at loose forward and had another hard-working campaign which resulted in Rovers coming within a cat’s whisker of Super League, only to be denied by Richard’s former club Wakefield.

For the 1999 season, Rovers re-signed kiwi loose forward and local hero Brendon Tuuta, but Slater kept his place at the back of the scrum, with Tuuta now operating at second-row, and even occasionally at prop. At the end of the 1999 season and after four years of sterling service, Slater moved on to Hull Kingston Rovers where he spent a couple of years, before finishing with two seasons at Dewsbury. In total he played 111 games for Featherstone and scored 12 tries.