One of my earliest memories of being a Hull KR fan is from 2004. In July of that year, my dad, Graham, a Rovers fan since 1965, and a few minibuses worth of fans travelled to Spotland in Rochdale for the final of what was then known as the Arriva Trains Cup, an early incarnation of what is now the 1895 Cup, contested between lower league clubs. At the time, we thought that was a big game.

Fast-forward over twenty years, and my old man and I witnessed our little club reach the Grand Final of the Super League for the first time. In front of a molten-hot Craven Park crowd, our club, which had to be saved by a band of supporters less than 30 years ago, we overcame Warrington Wolves to secure our place at Old Trafford, and a chance at immortality, and they’ll be more than just a few minibuses going to this particular final, with the club supposedly laying on more than sixty coaches to Manchester next week.

I’m really going to try not to tread too much old ground here, as I know I have made a few similar posts in the short life-span of this website. Still, it is worth repeating just how far we’ve come as a club, even in my nearly thirty years on this planet, so this article may be a bit self-indulgent. I apologise if that doesn’t make for particularly riveting reading for the neutral, but this is very much my love letter to my club and our sport.

As alluded to earlier, Hull KR really weren’t in a good place in the late 1990s (to be fair, neither were our cross-city rivals, but they bounced back much quicker). When I was born, in 1995, Hull KR were in the third division of rugby league, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Two years later, in 1997, the club entered administration. If it weren’t for a loyal group of supporters (Rovers Supporters Group) then Hull KR may well have ceased to exist in 1997. Through the RSG’s fundraising and the diligence of our administrators, we limped on, finally being sold to a new owner in 2000.

It was around 2003-2004 when I first started going to watch Rovers. I had an early dalliance with the dark side since all my school friends supported them, but then my Dad started taking me to Rovers, and I never looked back. It is regretful that I don’t have a clear memory of my first game like my dad does (his first game was against Leigh in 1965, maybe I can persuade him one day to write his own story for this site), but I remember that final in 2004, at Spotland. I remember thinking it must mean we were a big team to be in a cup final, and that maybe we’ll be beating Hull FC soon so all my friends would shut up about how much better they were than us (I’ve just had a cursory glance at Wikipedia to see where FC finished in the 2004 SL season, they finished third, so yeah, fair enough).

2004 was a big year for the club in general though as that’s when our current chairman, and modern Hull KR hero, Neil Hudgell bought the club. Hudgell is a typical “local boy done good”, he used to be a ball boy at the old Craven Park as a kid, and as a successful solicitor, when the chance came to buy his boyhood club, he took it, along with fellow investor Rob Crossland, who sadly died earlier this year.

I have mentioned before how Craven Park was rough when I first started going, and that bears repeating again, if you think it’s bad now, you’d have hate to have seen it twenty years ago. There was a speedway track and a greyhound track surrounding it, so you were miles away from everything, the toilets were practically trenches in the ground (Lord only knows what the ladies’ facilities were like if indeed there were any), and there were mounds of sands perpetually situated behind the east stand.

Still, I hold treasured memories of those days, as one tends to do when feeling nostalgic for one’s youth. Those mounds of sand made ideal landing places for my and my friend Anthony’s impromptu games of rugby behind the stands, and it was always fun seeing the same old faces in the same old places, even if we were all miles apart. Me, Anthony, my dad, and Anthony’s dad, Charlie (RIP), were regular companions in the East stand and on the road in those rougher days, we even attended the 2005 Northern Rail Cup victory against Castleford. A memory comes to me of a long-lost photo of me and Anthony getting then-captain James Webster’s autograph. Happy memories of a turbulent time for the club.

Neil Hudgell’s investment really kicked into high gear for the 2006 season, both on and off the field. The stadium saw some much-needed improvements with the removal of the speedway and dog tracks, and the team went full-time for the first time in the club’s history. We went most of that season unbeaten in the National League One, and sealed promotion in the Grand Final against Widnes at Warrington. Once again, we thought we were witnessing the pinnacle of what our club could achieve. We would have to be very optimistic to imagine things getting better than that.

We kept the momentum up the following season, 2007, as we secured Super League survival following a memorable 42-6 victory against our old enemies on their turf. We had started to attract better players, with the likes of former Australian international Mick Vella signing for us as well as the eternally youthful Stanley Gene returning to the club. The next few years too would see steady improvement. We signed players like Michael Dobson, Clint Newton, and Jake Webster to name but a few, as we really started to establish ourselves as a Super League side.

Throughout all this, Neil Hudgell was still the man shouldering the costs of the club, not only had he invested to turn our fortunes around, but he kept investing to make sure we stayed competitive. The club owes the position it’s in today mainly to him, and I sincerely doubt that he imagined for a second when he first bought the club back in 2004 that he’d ever be able to see them walk out at Old Trafford during his ownership.

Unfortunately, the good times weren’t to last, and as the 2010s went on, the club started to stagnate and become much too comfortable with its position in the Super League. We had become complacent, and in 2016 we paid the price.

We all know the whens and wheres of Rover’s 2016 relegation. It is one game we missed though, as we had tickets for a show booked down in London (Les Miserables, in case you were wondering). I can’t pretend that getting that score update after the show didn’t put a dampener on our trip, but what made the experience all the more galling was that our hated rivals finally broke their Wembley hoodoo during the same season, winning the 2016 Challenge Cup.

Anyway, in 2017, we bounced back, and I’m sure I’m starting to repeat myself here from past posts, but suffice it to say that it hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows since we returned to the Super League in the 2018 season. We flirted with relegation in our first few seasons back and indeed were only saved the drop for a second time by the collapse of Toronto Wolfpack in 2020.

Since then we’ve had a few stops and starts, but the worm finally started to turn around 2022-23. That’s when we appointed Willie Peters as coach, and our board expanded to include several influential local businesspeople, thereby making the club seem like a much better prospect, in those two years, the turn-around has been astonishing. We’ve finished fourth, and then second, reached a Challenge Cup final, and now a first-ever Grand Final, all in front of ever-increasing and vocal crowds, making Craven Park one of the most feared grounds for clubs to visit.

We are almost spoilt now by the on-field product we’re treated to compared to what games were like when I first started going. Now, we’re seriously in the conversation for title challengers, and it’s hard to see that changing next season either, with even more firepower being added to our squad in the forms of Jared Waerea-Hargreaves and Rhyse Martin, not to mention up-and-comer Eribe Doro from Bradford.

So, our future may be bright in years to come, but we still have a job to do this season. We stand on the brink of a truly special achievement, a first Super League title, and being the first new name on the trophy in a long old time (since Leeds in 2004, there’s that year again!). Are we the favourites? No, probably not. Wigan are the top team in the Super League for a reason, and their semi-final victory tonight proved that. That being said, however, I’d like to think that we took a few lessons from our narrow defeat in Wigan just a few weeks ago, and are more than capable of pulling off an upset.

What’s best about all this for me¹, is getting to experience it all with my Dad, the person who took me to my first game, and who has seen Rovers’ success before, and has waited a long time for the good times to return. I have never seen such good times, and as such this is all a new and strange feeling (that last five minutes in the semi were perhaps the most stressful of my life), but I’m forever glad that I decided not to listen to my playground peers and chose the underdogs twenty years ago. So this isn’t just a love letter to my club, but also to the memories I’ve made along the way with my Dad, I hope there are many more to come, starting next Saturday.

Written by Nathan Major-Kershaw (Site editor & Hull KR fan)

1. Admittedly, there is a sizable part of me that wants to win next week all the more just to shut up the FC fans. Just as I’m sure a fair few Black-and-Whites were thinking the same at Wembley in 2016, as much as they probably wouldn’t want to admit it. I’m referring to “that” song they have by the way, just for clarity. ↩︎