Bradford Bulls claim they fear no-one after Featherstone win

But while the gap between the two sides appeared to be closing last season, Featherstone still won the league at a canter, finishing a massive 17 points clear of third-placed Bulls.

And few expected injury-hit Bradford to win at Fev yesterday, given they had not tasted success at Post Office Road since way back in 2015.

But they stunned Rovers with a 24-14 away victory, ending a nine-year hoodoo with a largely brilliant defensive performance, peppered with moments of real attacking flair.

Discussing his side’s ability to now take it to the best the Championship has to offer after the game, Bulls head coach Eamon O’Carroll said: “I can’t comment fully on what’s gone before, but I do feel those seeds were planted late last year under Greeny (Lee Greenwood) and Nobby (Brian Noble) when they were in charge.

“They did a fantastic job instilling that belief into the lads.

“I just want to make it clear that we’re not getting excited here, because there are areas of our game where we need to be a lot better, or we’ll get burned going forward.

“But on the flipside of that, I am extremely proud of the group who were out there today.

“How they’re sticking together, how they’re trying to implement things we’ve worked on in training, and that is a pleasing factor.”

Despite a tough start to the season on the injury and fixture front, Bulls have followed up an opening night defeat at title favourites Wakefield with fine wins over Halifax and Featherstone to pick up an extremely creditable four points from six, when, looking at the names missing, some may have predicted they would still be yet to get off the mark.

O’Carroll said: “This is an incredibly tough competition and everyone was looking at our start (Toulouse and Widnes are up next for Bulls) thinking we’ve got one of the hardest ones.

“But even looking past the first five games, I don’t see any easy ones for us after that.

“On paper, it looks like we’re playing the top five teams in the league in our first five games, but that’s the great challenge of the Championship rugby.

“We’ve managed to get a couple of wins, but we have to keep backing that up now.

“After we beat Halifax, I said it was brilliant to get that feeling of a victory under our belts, but we want to be a consistent team, backing up those performances, and we did that today.”

It could have all been so different too, with Fev well on top either side of half-time, partially helped by a sin-bin after 32 minutes for Mitch Souter.

But even with the Australian back on the field, Bulls conceded a try to let the hosts draw level at 10-10, only for Louix Gorman to pull the conversion horribly wide in the win.

The wind played a part in Featherstone failing to retrieve the resulting kick off too, and in a panic, they conceded a penalty.

That allowed Jordan Lilley to put Bulls quickly back in front after being pegged back, and the visitors never looked back from there.

Jordan Lilley helped himself to a couple of vital second-half penalties in Bulls' tense 24-14 victory. (Image: Tom Pearson.)

Asked if that was a pivotal 90 seconds or so of play, O’Carroll reflected: “Potentially it was.

“I think the conditions were extremely difficult, and you could see that with Jordan missing a couple of kicks at goal despite hitting the ball well.

“But we were still fairly calm at that stage, while the game was tight.

“We thought we handled the pressure on us really well, but there were just a couple of times we came out of our system and Featherstone are a really dangerous side if you do that.

“They’ve got players like Paul Turner and Caleb Aekins who can really take advantage when you present them with opportunities like that.

“But I was confident that as long as we stayed within our system, we’d be able to handle the majority of what they threw at us.”