Castleford coach Daryl Powell admitted their win over Salford on Friday came at a cost: with leading try-scorer Greg Eden likely to miss the rest of the season.
Eden suffered a shoulder injury in the act of scoring his second try – and 34th of the season – during the 38-14 win against the Red Devils on Friday night.
He was subsequently taken to hospital: and Powell admitted the initial prognosis was not good.
He said: “I’m really disappointed for Greg Eden. He’ll probably be out for the year with that which is a massive blow.
“He’s been going awesome for us. But (Joel) Monaghan is a proven winger and scored a couple of tries tonight himself. We’ve got Jy Hitchcox who has done pretty well for us and also Greg Minikin of course. This happens. Every team has to deal with a little bit of adversity. We’ll just crack on.”
On his side’s victory, Powell said Castleford were below-par before praising his side’s defensive efforts.
He said: “We weren’t at our best tonight. We pulled some smart bits out in both halves but we made too many errors, particularly in the first half. But we defended really well for the most part.”
On his side’s fifth defeat in six games, Salford coach Ian Watson said: “I thought our middles stood up really well but we’ve been let down by our defence which I don’t think anyone will disagree with.
“It’s something we need to fix up and we will do. We’ll play these again so this is a good experience for us. We’ll be better for this experience come the Super 8s. Like I say, we’ll play Cas again and we’ll see how we go then.
“We’ll come back here pretty confident if we have to play them here in the Super 8s.”