News

Posted: Tuesday 8th September 2020

Shenton thanks Cas fans generosity

Castleford Tigers captain Michael Shenton pens a column about the restart month and thanks the Season Ticket holders who have chosen to keep their money in the club.

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In his regular column in our monthly club magazine ROAR, Shenny discusses the challenges and changes that occurred during August and looks ahead to the busy period of the coming two months.

You can read September's edition of ROAR, for free, at castlefordtigers.com/roar.

The first month of the restart has been tough with a lot of challenges thrown at us and we were a bit rusty, myself definitely I was rusty, and perhaps we didn’t handle the changes in fixtures or anything else that came alongside it well enough when coming up against three of the most form teams in the comp, it was always going to be a tough start.

How we performed against Saints set the standard for what we can do, what we can achieve against the in-form team in Super League and doing a real good job over there. Jake pulling out on the day of the game, a mix up in the squad and a bit of adversity against us, we showed what we could do and we felt confident heading into the Wigan game but we didn’t perform. It was a really frustrating performance and we thought we were good enough to win that game, a lot of things went against us but we should have had that game.

Heading into the Salford week it had turned into a real ‘must-win’ game, we prepared well and had a great week knowing what they would throw at us and they would be difficult side. That first 15 minutes was unbelievable, to put ourselves under that much pressure early on was crazy and the scoreline should never have been that. However, we showed real character; when you're under the pump, perhaps playing a bit low on confidence and the pressure is on – to hold our nerve and fight our way back into that game shows that this team has got some steel and real metal behind it. I’m really proud of the boys with the way we handled that and fought back in. There are areas for improvement for sure that we are going to continue to work on, but it was a hard-fought win in which we showed some good composure.

The rest of the fixtures will come thick and fast with a three-day turnaround from a league game to our Cup game, our focus will be on the Warrington game first and no doubt Daryl and the rest of the coaching staff are going to think about strategy for the Cup game. Hopefully, we’re going to have players getting over a few niggles too and we’ll have a healthy squad to allow rotation and some freshness. We know heading into this period was going to be tough for everybody right across the league to fit games in with tight turnarounds, changes of opponents, kick-off times, venues and it’s just the adversity we have to be able to adapt to. We’ve been a little slow at adapting ourselves but I think now we are finding our feet and every one of us in the playing squad are all on board with high training standards and we will have a real good crack at both competitions.

Finally, I would like to say thank you to every supporter who has donated their Season Ticket money back into the club and it’s just another example of how much this team means to people. Our players, our staff have all made sacrifices for the club and I know our fans have as well, it’s a lot of money that people are giving up but it means so much everyone at the Tigers, especially the players. To see our fans doing that and ensure we have a club come the end of this pandemic, from myself and the rest of Castleford Tigers we are truly grateful to all the supporters who are doing their bit for the team, we understand how much this club means and that’s why we want to get on a roll and have a successful season – not just for ourselves, it’s mainly for our supporters. We want to give something back to the fans that have been so generous and giving the club their money. Thank you again, it’s massively appreciated.

Stay safe and all the best,

Shenny