Castleford Tigers suffer massive blow

Andy Last has opened up on Castleford Tigers injury woes.

He confirmed that Greg Eden is set for a few weeks on BBC Radio Leeds:

“He’s a couple of weeks still away coming back from some hamstring pain so we’re doing a bit of work on him. That’s tracked into a bit of a calf issue so we’ve got to box clever with Greg.

“He’s a really high performance athlete and we need to make sure he’s 100% right before we consider him for selection. We’re hoping it might be a couple of weeks time.”

But the big blow for the Tigers is the loss of Niall Evalds for almost the entire season:

“Niall unfortunately requires surgery on that pectoral tear so he’s going to miss the majority of the season, potentially all the season for us, so that’s not good news for Niall.

“It’s a huge blow. At the beginning of the year you look and think that if we can get Niall Evalds, England international, very good Super League level full-back, and add that experience of Miller and Widdop with Westerman at thirteen and McShane at hooker then you’ve got a really competitive spine.

“I think they’ve been on the field together maybe once or twice, we’ve had to do it tough in that position.

“The teams that tend to be at the top of the table have that continuity and consistency in those key positions, unfortunately for us we’re doing it a bit tough and we’ve had some difficult selection issues in those key positions.

“Unfortunately for Niall he’s played a small part this season. We’d been expecting him to have a greater significant role but he’s picked up a couple of nasty injuries and this one obviously is one that requires surgery.”

He also addressed the club’s options there:

“We’ve got the luxury of potentially putting Gareth Widdop back there and giving him an opportunity then moving Broadbent into six where he’s played a couple of games and excelled.

“Gaz has great experience from time in the NRL and internationally at full-back, he’s an option. Will Tate played there as a junior so there are some options. We’ve just got to make the right selection depending on who we play and who we have available.”

Meanwhile, he also said that Albert Vete has been hit by another calf injury:

“That’s a calf, history has repeated itself from his time at Hull KR. He picked up a calf injury maybe fix or six weeks ago, we got him back to where we thought he was okay but he felt his calf tighten up again. We’re back to the drawing board there.”