Castleford Tigers fullback Niall Evalds still looks back on winning the Lance Todd Trophy as a bittersweet moment as he aims to reach the final for the third year running.
Evalds took a majority of the votes as player of the match in last year’s Challenge Cup final at Wembley, despite ending up on the losing side against St Helens.
He was the first player to win the award but not claim the Challenge Cup trophy to go with it since Kevin Sinfield in 2005.
And Evalds admits that even nine months on – and with Castleford competing on Friday at Hull Kingston Rovers for a place in the semi-finals in this year’s competition – it is still difficult to take much satisfaction from the achievement.
“It still feels a bit hollow,” he said. “At half-time I thought we were in a really good place in that game but Saints are a team that come at you for 80 minutes. To let that second half go the way it did and not do ourselves justice, I think that hurt us all.
“It was a bittersweet feeling after. The Lance Todd is always something I’ve wanted to win and I think I came close the year before as well. It’s something that maybe at the back end of my career or when I’m retired, I’ll appreciate it more.”
That losing feeling on the grand stage is something that Evalds has become all too familiar with. He has done so at Wembley two years running, having lost by just a single point to Leeds Rhinos in 2020 while a Salford Red Devils player.
The season before that, Salford were beaten in the Super League Grand Final, making it three years in a row that Evalds has finished as a runner-up.
His career remains without the decoration of a major trophy as a result, and he admits that fact is a big motivation for him.
“I’m 28 now, I want to win a trophy,” he said. “You don’t know how many more big games you’ll be able to play in, so to get the win this week and put ourselves in the next round of the cup is massive.
“We’ve spoken as a team about how winning silverware is what you grow up wanting to do, so we’ve got to put together a good performance against a good Hull KR side on Friday.”
