Your assessment is 100% correct faxcar

Well said Faxcar. Hit the nail on the head.

Apart from it not being any sort of joke sadly.

Agreed.

Also it is fundamentally clear that the RFL consider teams like Fax being also-rans. Of the local sides even, I get the feeling that nobody has anything really positive to say about us - maybe apart from the Warrington game on TV . They would want Fev up over us clearly and if they could have London too they would be bubbling over!

Our defence has been outstanding this year - particularly at Wire and on TV too! If we could find/nurture a couple of game-breakers / line breakers, we could push for the MPG all by ourselves next year, again ALL odds!

I agree with that but.... why would the RFL favour Featherstone over Fax? What have we done wrong?

Very good question. Maybe people saw that we WERE successful once and that is our lot? Depressing tho.

Ask the Fat Controller

I follow a championship club and am on a strict diet at the moment, so I doubt very much that our paths will cross anytime soon.

Wait, what? Where's your evidence for this?

Nigel Wood's one man campaign to destroy 'Fax, starting with naming us the Blue Sox, I rest my case.

Very well put.

Still, cheer up - you could well have a local derby against us (Leigh) back on the agenda!

This is a bit like saying Donald Trump prefers Mexicans to Moslems, though.

I know, they don't want either of us, we just have to do our best to get under their skin.

It will be fascinating to see what happens if Catalans were to be the ones to come down and how the RFL manoeuvre the restructure so they can go straight back up.
I see a recipe for a Frenchy Franchise in the making courtesy of michelin man Nigella.

Can't see Catalans going down. The machinations to keep them in are gathering pace. Firstly we have Bird's ridiculous reduction of suspension, next there will be a glut of Widnes/Leigh/London players up before the Disciplinary, and what odds Tony Gigot appealing successfully, yet again, against his two year ban?

That pitiful nickname did more harm to our club than most people realise. At the time i had a right old rant about it (think DR) but to no avail. It was 'only a nickname and marketing tool but was disastrous. If anyone with half a brain had thought up something worse to market a rugby league club they couldn't picked owt as bad. It made us literally, and quite rightly, a laughing stock.

He didn't want a nickname that some people wouldn't like so he picked one nobody liked.

Not that I'm biased or easily lead to believe in conspiracy theories or anything but fully agree and I have to have something to blame the French for apart from our nil pois.

Indeed but I do believe he had an excellent fact finding mission to the USA before it, or was it a fat finding mission? Who knows, it was all bollox if you ask me.

It could have been worse. if he'd gone to Canada we might have finished up as Halifax Dock Leaves

IIRC The suggestion was that we should be called Halifax Bombers this was obviously non pc hence the ridiculous Blue Sox moniker making us a laughing stock

I am going to be controversial here, but I don’t think the Bluesox name was as bad as people make out. I think we use it as an excuse for everything else that went wrong with the club. Yes we had the odd joke thrown our way (but so does Bulls**t, the Whinos, the Worriers), but the thing about the name was everybody knew which team it belonged to and that was the idea behind it. Most fans actually took to it, we could chant the name, more than most clubs did with theirs. The fact that commentators still (accidentally) refer to us as the Bluesox so many years after we got rid probably tells you that it was actually quite a strong brand. Had we been successful on the field then I’m pretty certain we wouldn’t have had such an issue with it (we certainly didn’t in 1998 when we finished 3rd) and it wasn’t the name that caused our demise, moving from Thrum Hall was the main catalyst for this.

It was said Bombers might upset the Germans. A) who are they? and B)Who cares anyway?

I agree with that. It also the same idea that Bradford took half of our fans that also bores me to tears. At the same time if Bradford did steal any of our fans we had the same resources as them so we would have nobody to blame but ourselves if that did happen to be true. Crowds were already dropping even when we did finish 3rd and have steadily declined since despite us having some success. It probably does not help that as good a stadium we are lucky to play in, it is an absolutely awful ground for atmosphere unless it is at least half full which at the moment there is no danger of.