
Castleford Tigers fell to an embarrassing defeat against St Helens with Craig Lingard’s side folding in the second half and conceding 52 unanswered points to lose 60-4.
The loss to St Helens comes after a string of improved performances that have seen Castleford creep up the table with wins over London Broncos and a draw against Leigh Leopards.
Given the humiliating nature of defeat, it feels like two steps backwards for the Tigers and Craig Lingard has slammed his players in the post-match press conference.
Addressing the media, Lingard’s blunt assessment saw him label the showing as “extremely poor.”
Asked for his thoughts, Lingard didn’t hold back: “Extremely poor, extremely poor. That’s as poor of a second half as you could possibly get.
“We’ve built them up over the last couple of weeks, the last two or three weeks, with their effort and the desire and the commitment. In the second half, it was almost like we were back to the Huddersfield game again where they put the cue on the rack and almost accepted that they were going to get beat and just stopped. That can’t happen. It can’t happen at all.”
Castleford Tigers’ “naivety” leads to hammering

Credit: SWpix
It was a game that had the hallmarks of being a close one when St Helens were reduced to 12 men early on with Tommy Makinson shown a red card for a high shot after a quarter of an hour.
At that point, the Tigers were 4-0 down but they would go in 8-4 down at the half having failed to capitalise on the man advantage. That man advantage didn’t last much longer as Liam Horne was then sent off in the 52nd minute, but Craig Lingard lamented the lack of control in that first half.
The Castleford Tigers head coach said: “We showed an immense amount of naivety in that first half when Saints went down to 12 and we didn’t manage the game at all.
“We tried to go wide too soon, we tried to go round them. When you’re down to 12 men, the team are going to hunt from the inside so you’ve got to drop angles, you’ve got to come back against the grain and try and create a little bit of disruption in their defensive line.
“You need to get leg tackles, get inside shows, we kept sending the message on to make sure ‘let’s go back against the grain, inside balls, let’s test them out’, but then we kept going wide and kept going wide, didn’t complete it, just over 40% in that first half.
“When a team’s down to 12, you’ve got to take the juice out of the tank, and we just kept fueling them, kept fueling them with mistake after mistake after mistake, and we’ve got to be smarter, got to be smarter with it in that situation.”
The second half was even worse though with Castleford capitulating after Liam Horne’s send-off, conceding 46 points in just 28 minutes and that promoted another tirade from Lingard.
He explained: “So the second half, we’re just immensely poor. We touched the ball four times in the whole of the second 40 minutes, and the fourth time we touched it we kicked it away on tackle one.
“We’ve got to be smart. That’s just dumb, it’s just dumb rugby and it’s almost like we’re taking shortcuts and you’ve got to be smart in that respect.”
Castleford Tigers will have a week off now before facing Hull FC in an all-important game as the two strugglers face off against each other.
