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The day Fax set that record...
Midway through the second half of the game against Batley a couple of weeks ago we were all getting ready to drag the record books down from the shelf.
That was due to Lee Paterson's unpredicted goalscoring feat of twelve from as many efforts.
The club record for points in a match however still stands at 32 but only ten goals wereincluded in that total because John Schuster the holder scored three tries in that particular match, at Doncaster, who were last Sunday's visitors to the Shay.
The final score was 72-0 which is still a club record away victory but it was achieved under strange circumstances.
Steve Simms had only been officially at the club for a month in October 1994 when it all happened but found himself in the midst of an injury crisis at that time.
On the Thursday night before the trip to Tattersfield he only had eleven professionals out on the Thrum Hall pitch who were fit to train.
The treatment room had 15 players in it or queueing outside it and Tony Anderson's Alliance team had gone to Doncaster with a bare 13 players.
And they were hammered 45-0.
The second team was going through a traumatic spell.
A lot of experienced players who had been stalwarts at this level like Damieon Pickles, Chris Robinson, Henry Sharp and Gary Richardson had all left and a few local lads like Darren Phillips, Gary Lewis and Matt Smith were being used; in the end the team were relegated.
And Sunday's game at first team level looked like being a tough one against the surprise team in the division.
In the end Simms took his 14 fit senior players plus teenagers Steve Greenwood and James Rushforth and it was the former who got the nod for the last place on the substitutes bench.
There was one piece of good news on arrival – there had been a change of referee that morning and Hull's David Atkin was now in charge.
We had first come across him at Sheffield the previous season when Allan Agar had been Fax caretaker coach.
The two of them had been staring at each other in the tunnel at the Don Valley Stadium as the teams were ready to take the field and Agar had whispered, "I know him from somewhere....".
It turned out that as a pre-teenager Atkin had cleaned Agar's boots at Hull KR where Roger Millward had been his idol.
This isn't to say that he was biased but he definitely liked Halifax!
All the usual suspects scored in the rout – Steve Hampson, John Bentley, Schuster, Graeme Hallas, Mark Preston, Michael Hagan, Gary Divorty (whose son Ross turned for the Dons last Sunday), Wayne Parker and Roy Southernwood – but the future was brighter for some, not all of them.
The next league fixture was a Tuesday night match at Featherstone where Hampson suffered a bad break to his arm to continue the tale of injury woe.
It was effectively the end of his Halifax career and you suspected that he knew it as he huddled with a blanket round him forlornly waiting for the ambulance.....
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Weather for Halifax
Saturday 11 February 2012
Today
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Temperature: -2 C to 0 C
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