Holly plays the numbers game
Published Date:
21 August 2008
By Dave Fleming
TWO matches minimum to the end of the season.
Eight, or nine, goals required to break the Halifax club record for goals in a campaign currently standing at 147 by Tuss Griffiths in 1955/56.
Those are the stats in front of Graham Holroyd.
The slight confusion is caused by the fact that the RFL don't recognise the goal that he kicked against Melbourne Storm as in their eyes it wasn't a competitive fixture!
So he has either 135 or 136 to date depending on your point of view.
Strangely enough though, great kickers tend to be remembered sometimes for the ones they miss rather than the many that they successfully land.
John Schuster was a prolific marksman in the mid 1990's but people still remember the one he fluffed at Wigan in March 1997 which would have earned the Blue Sox a point.
Paul Bishop wasn't bad either but he still contrived to put one under the bar from in front of the posts at the same ground four years before that.
Older fans sometimes still talk about Griffiths in connection with the 1954 Challenge Cup final at Wembley.
That match against Warrington was an arid affair which finished 4-4 but only because his late penalty just faded wide of the posts.
If he had been successful we wouldn't have had that Odsal replay though!
Garfield Owen reached 145 in 1959/60 when he was an everpresent that season and Schuster was also agonisingly close with 142 in 1994/95.
Owen managed 130 in 1960/61 and Malcolm Agar managed 102 in the early 1980's.
But Griffiths' presence was missed more often than not.
In 1956 Fax lost the championship final 10-9 to Hull when they couldn't convert any of their three tries; Griffiths had picked up a fractured cheekbone in the Wembley defeat by St Helens the week before.
But what of the bloke who set the record all those years ago. Modern fans, especially the younger ones, would find the fullback of 50 or 60 years ago a strange phenomenon.
They tended to be dapper characters with neat haircuts; the prototype was Hubert Lockwood who played from the mid 1930's until after the war, he was succeeded by Dennis Chalkley and latterly by Griffiths.
They used to say that Lockwood came off the pitch as immaculate as when he went onto it but all these players had the same job description.
They had safe hands, were steady tacklers and could kick the ball an awful long way, sometimes in "kicking duels" where they tested each other's handling for several minutes at a time whilst the forwards got a rest!
Griffiths - as his Christian name Tyssul indicates - was a Welshman who came north to sign for Hunslet before moving to Doncaster and then Halifax in 1952 when £850 changed hands.
In 1953/54 he equalled Lockwood's record of 117 goals in a season in one of the strongest teams in the club's history.
That 1955/56 season saw him rewrite the record books again with those 147 goals and 297 points.
Colin Whitfield broke the latter one by a point in 1986/87 before Schuster later raised the bar again.
The full article contains 539 words and appears in n/a newspaper.
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Last Updated:
21 August 2008 12:18 PM
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Source:
n/a
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Location:
Halifax