As a matter of interest, does being selected but not actually getting on the pitch, actually counts as an official appearance?

Or, in other words, has he made his debut.....or not.

Doesn't count according to my History of Bradford Northern - Nigel Williams only counts appearances when they make it onto the pitch.

Nigel Williams, that's a blast from the past. I remember him spending years gathering all the stats for his book

His book is the best for any stats up to 1989. The fella must have spent years on it. It's a work of art. Is he still around?

Like a lot of others I was shouting for the introduction of Lee Smith. We looked to be tiring, pressing the self destruct button whilst having an unused experienced head on the subs bench was a gamble which clearly came off. It was a brave (or clever) move by the coach. I think if we had lost, feelings on this thread might have been somewhat different. Still, the end justified the means and a wins a win.

He was the official club historian, though I forget just when his name stopped being heard around.

Nigel always recorded sub appearances as separate to 1 -13 appearances too, which I'm not sure is something that modern historians would do, but of course, back in the 'old days' (not sure when it changed) subs were only allowed in the case of injury, so it was quite common for subs to never appear on the field.

I used to work with him and he spent most of his break times while doing 12 hour shifts manually writing up all the stats. He used to live up Allerton way. He eventually left and published his book and I met him a couple of times after but have not seen or heard of him for quite a few years now.

I'm going to assume he made his fortune and that I can completely abandon my current career plans.

Erm, I probably wouldn't abandon everything straight away

Too late. All in.

Presumably if we had held onto the 28-6 lead for a bit longer he could have played the final 20 mins and then been in better shape to play a bigger part next week. It seemed to me like the sort of calculated risk that coaches have to take which this time didnt work out.

I'd bet similar, I didn't see Smith so don't know what sort of shape he looks to be in, but I assume when it got to squeaky bum time maybe he didn't think that was the time to let Smith stretch his legs

I must have missed this conversation last week when Halafihi was the unused sub...!

I notice that foreign bloke/blokess is still writing the match reports.

Largely because people were just relieved we didn't have to see the useless bugger on the pitch so kept quiet about it in the hope he didn't get game time next week.