CASTLEFORD TIGERS went down 42-10 to the Salford Red Devils at The Jungle tonight.
It was a poor performance from Andy Last’s side, who couldn’t expand on their great win over Leeds Rhinos last weekend.
For Last himself, he was bitterly disappointed.
“I’m disappointed with the result,” Last said. “The scoreline was disappointing but it’s been a really tough week.
“You have a morale boosting week with a good win over Leeds and then Monday afternoon the injury report comes in and that we would be playing Salford with six of the starting 17 not playing.
“It was always going to be a challenge and then we lose McShane and Fonua with 60 minutes of the game to go. It meant we had 15 players and one of those is a young lad making his debut.
“The lads didn’t throw the towel in but Salford are a slick team and when you’ve got a patched up team, they were ruthless and exposed that. It was a challenging night but we can’t be too disappointed.
“We will use this week to freshen up and get some bodies back.”
Last does, however, have potentially bad news on captain Paul McShane with the injuries to George Lawler and Sam Hall explained.
“It looks like a fractured forearm, we are hoping it’s just a really bad dead arm but he thinks it could be fractured.
“He is in Pinderfields Hospital with an X-ray. I don’t want to speculate too much, hopefully he has just had a hefty blow to it. If it is fractured he will miss a great chunk of the season.
“George Lawler picked up a quad strain in the team run. He had a scan this morning and has a quad strain.
“We ended up having to call Aaron Willis in late. He did a good job, but I was reluctant to throw him in too early and didn’t want to expose him when Salford were running hot. We gave him 20 minutes to get him a feel of Super League.
“Liam Watts will be back next week, the RFL helped us there to stand him down for one match. That was a difficult one to cop, Sam Hall picked up his knock in practice. That was a bad blow to his knee and he didn’t feel comfortable.”
The Castleford boss did slam the officials’ calls early on in the game.
“I’m not one to complain about the officials, but the game provides some moments as a team where you look to build pressure and you hope in those moments you take those.
“The first try, however, Rhys Williams pushes Mahe Fonua quite clearly and Mahe goes down and Williams scores the try. That was disappointing. I thought it was a poor one to miss.
“Then Ken Sio is carrying the ball from their 30-metre line and there is quite clearly a Salford player in the defensive line and Joe Westerman couldn’t make the contact. It allowed them to kick in good ball field position, but if that doesn’t happen then they wouldn’t be kicking in good ball position. They scored two tries off the back of two errors from officials but we all make mistakes.”
