Widnes Vikings Beat North Wales Crusaders 116-6 to Set Club Record Winning Margin
Twenty tries at Stadiwm CSM produced Widnes Vikings' biggest ever win, with Danny Richardson setting club records for goals and points in a game.
Widnes Vikings beat North Wales Crusaders 116-6 at Stadiwm CSM on Sunday 12 July, scoring 20 tries in a Betfred Championship fixture that produced the largest winning margin in the club’s history and two individual club records for half-back Danny Richardson.
The records
The 110-point margin surpassed the previous club best, a 90-0 win over Coventry Bears in April 2018. Widnes passed that mark with roughly a quarter of the game still to play, at 92 points, and kept scoring.
Richardson kicked 18 goals from 20 tries, the most individual goals in a match by a Widnes player, and scored three tries of his own. Three tries and 18 goals gives 48 points, also a club record for an individual in a single game. Four players reached at least three tries: Mike Butt scored four, with hat-tricks for Richardson, Frank Sergent and Nathan Connell. Jack Owens scored twice, and Kieran Taylor, Matty Fozard, Danny Langtree, Max Roberts and Lewis Hall each crossed once.
An 18-from-20 goalkicking return is the detail that separates a heavy win from a record one. Conversions from wide positions are the ones that get missed in a rout, and a 90 per cent success rate across 20 attempts on an away ground is what converted 20 tries into 116 points rather than something in the high nineties.
How the match unfolded
Widnes scored inside three minutes, Fozard breaking the line and handing on to Taylor to go in under the posts. By the tenth minute Allan Coleman’s side had three converted tries, Butt and Richardson adding to Taylor’s opener. Three minutes later Fozard took an inside ball from Owens and went over.
Crusaders held out for a spell, but four more tries followed before the interval: two for Sergent, and further scores from Butt and Richardson.
The second half brought no reduction in tempo. Connell worked through the defence and put Sergent in at the corner for his hat-trick, and tries from Owens and Langtree took the lead to 62 points with about half an hour remaining. Roberts took an inside pass from Deacon Connolly to score under the posts, then Hall took a hand-off from Fozard to run in.
Richardson’s third, and further tries from Roberts and Owens, moved the score to 92 and past the 2018 record. Connell then scored his first after Tom Gilmore chased his own kick and offloaded. Crusaders got on the board when Joe Bradley intercepted a Widnes pass and ran clear, converting his own try. Connell added two more inside eight minutes to complete his hat-trick, and Butt finished the scoring to take his own tally to four.
The season context
The result reads very differently alongside the rest of the Widnes campaign. The Vikings had lost 10-28 at home to Oldham on 26 June and 6-26 at home to Doncaster on 1 July, two defeats at the DCBL Stadium in the space of six days. They then won 52-0 away at Goole on 4 July before the trip to Colwyn Bay.
Widnes had already beaten North Wales Crusaders 28-14 at the DCBL Stadium on 1 February. A 14-point home win in winter became a 110-point away win in July, which says less about Widnes improving by that margin and more about where the two clubs stood by mid-season. Crusaders named four interchanges and a thirteen that had to absorb 80 minutes of continuous pressure; the scoreline reflects a mismatch as much as a performance.
The wider 2026 record shows a side capable of both extremes. Widnes have posted 76-0, 54-0, 52-0, 48-0 and 46-0 wins this season, and have also lost at home to Oldham and Doncaster and away at Barrow and Dewsbury in April. The pattern is heavy scoring against the lower half of the Championship and tighter contests against the sides above them.
What happened after
The two fixtures that followed offer a useful check on what the 116-6 result meant. Widnes beat Barrow Raiders 24-8 at the DCBL Stadium on 18 July and Salford 52-8 at home on 24 July, so the form held through the rest of the month.
The first Sunday in August told a different story: Widnes lost 36-42 at home to London Broncos on 2 August. A 36-point return in defeat is a reminder that scoring heavily and defending well are separate problems, and that the July record says nothing about the second.
Why margins like this happen in the Championship
Scorelines of this size are rare but not unknown in the second tier of British rugby league. The Championship contains full-time and part-time squads in the same competition, and the resource gap between clubs at either end of the table is wide. When a full-time side with an established kicker meets a squad managing injuries and availability, and the weaker side loses field position early, the mathematics of rugby league compound quickly. Every restart after a conversion hands possession back to the scoring team’s opponents deep in their own half, and a tiring defence concedes more easily in the final 25 minutes than the first.
That is visible in the timeline here. Widnes were at 92 points with 30 minutes gone in the second half, and the last quarter produced a further four tries.
What to watch next
The immediate question is playoff position. Widnes have home fixtures against Workington on 23 August and away trips to Halifax on 16 August, Sheffield on 30 August and London Broncos on 31 August, the last of those at the Halliwell Jones Stadium. The London defeat on 2 August makes those matches consequential rather than routine.
Points difference is worth watching as a tiebreaker. A single result of this size materially alters a club’s for-and-against column, and in a division where sides can finish level on competition points, a 110-point swing in one afternoon can decide a placing. Whether it does depends entirely on results in the closing weeks.
Richardson’s goalkicking record is unlikely to be threatened soon, since it requires both a 20-try performance and near-perfect kicking in the same afternoon. Match highlights and reaction from the Crusaders game are on the club’s YouTube channel, and fixtures and league standings are published on the club website.