CLUB STATEMENT: IMG

Castleford Tigers would like to make the following statement ahead of the IMG Grading announcement at 10am.

Mark Grattan 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.”