Castleford Tigers boss calls for change after Liam Watts ban

Castleford Tigers Head Coach Craig Lingard has called for change regarding the rules around Head Contact after Liam Watt’s controversial red card and subsequent ban but insists he is supportive of the changes being made.

Lingard said in his weekly press conference: “Let me put a full stop on this now, I’m fully in support of the way rugby league are moving with this. We know that there’s going to be learning curves and things that we need to adjust to, but I think it’s also points of reassessment and re-evaluation.”

Lingard did however add that more consideration needs to be made: “I certainly think that taking the ball carrier’s height into contact, into consideration, is something we need to do.

“We brought this up earlier in the season when we were concerned that players might start running bent over or more bent over than usual but we were told that that wouldn’t be allowed to happen.

“But there have been certain contacts I’ve seen already this season where players may be leaning too much and I don’t think the Tyler Dupree leant too much either, I think it’s just one of them carries in a game where you end up falling down towards the ground a little bit faster than normal.”

Castleford Tigers coach calls for change

Lingard would go on to add that he felt that the sport needs to look into the meaning of the word mitigation and what can qualify for this.

He said: “I certainly think we need to look at the words in the mitigation about the players’ height because the initial response from the referee was that he was falling down and he made that indication with his arm as well but the words on the dismissal report were a little bit different than that.

“So I certainly think we need to have a little bit of reassessment over the height of the player coming into contact and maybe change the words in the mitigation that’s allowed for these contacts.”

Watts will now miss the next four games and pay a £750 fine for the offence.