CASTLEFORD TIGERS’ appeal on IMG’s provisional grading will not be revealed this week
League Express can reveal that a decision had been planned for this week – a fortnight on from the grading results that were given out to all 36 professional rugby league clubs – but that will no longer be happening, with next week now the intended target.
It is a frustrating time for Castleford fans who have been waiting for an update on their 12.16 points given to the West Yorkshire club by the new stakeholders.
Those points meant that the Tigers sat in 13th place in the table, just outside the 12 spots needed for a place in Super League.
However, the club had been determined in their quest that there had been a discrepancy over 0.75 points that they felt were owed to Castleford which would have put them in 11th place with 12.91 points.
At the time, Castleford’s managing director said: “On Monday we were given a grading score with just a headline number for the four categories. Each of the categories were as expected, as was the overall grading score. As a result of this, we did not challenge anything ahead of the 1pm Deadline on Tuesday 24th October.
“At 7pm yesterday evening, I received a phone call from Tony Sutton, CEO of the RFL to inform me that the RFL had made a mistake on one of the data lines in finance. This meant they were taking half a point off us which moved us down to 13th. At that point, we realised that the finance score was incorrect. Within an hour we spotted a missing data line that we had not submitted.
“I sent all of the supporting evidence to the RFL expecting our error to be amended as the RFL’s error was and we believe other clubs’ scores were amended. We were then informed later yesterday evening that due to the lateness of the information the grades would be published with the RFL’s amendment, but without ours and they would also allow us to appeal and they would be announcing that as part of the grading story.
“We are extremely disappointed with the RFL’s decision as both ourselves and the RFL made an error but the RFL error masked our error on the scores which meant up to 7pm yesterday evening, we believed our score to be correct.
“We will issue a further statement this afternoon with more detail into our IMG grading.”
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