Daryl Powell proud of Castleford’s season after difficult time with injuries

Drew Darbyshire

Castleford coach Daryl Powell is proud of what his side have achieved in 2019 following a string of long-term injuries to his key players.

The Tigers were eliminated from the Super League play-offs on Thursday night as they were defeated 22-0 by Salford at the AJ Bell Stadium.

Regular players Michael Shenton, Luke Gale, Oliver Holmes, Mike McMeeken, Jesse Sene-Lefao, Junior Moors and Alex Foster have been out for lengthy spells in 2019.

Powell is pleased with the way his team have handled adversity this year.

He said: “We can be proud of what we’ve done this year.

“It’s been a really frustrating year for a lot of reasons. We’ve had a lot of our better players have been sat watching games, which has made it tough.

“We got ourselves to fourth after the play-offs but it wasn’t a great night. Salford dominated us, they are a really good team and they played very well.

“We’ve worked so hard to give ourselves a chance to be successful this year and I think in a lot of ways we have been successful but we haven’t won anything.

“We’ve got to double our efforts and we’ve got a few players who need to improve a fair bit over pre-season and then we’ll go again.”


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