Major club could lose Super League status under IMG after appeal

Castleford Tigers were not happy after the release of the IMG grades; as Leeds Rhinos, Wigan Warriors, Warrington Wolves and others revelled in the fact they had been awarded Grade A status, the Tigers had to deal with the fact that they had finished 13th which would equate to them losing their Super League status if the same happens in a year’s time.

The Tigers have appealed the decision believing that an error has been made which could award them 0.75 points and take them to 12.91 points and up into the top 12.

This was something Mark Grattan explained on COYF: “I sent him all the statutory accounts over from the accountant to show where that was in the account, as we have to prove everything on all these kind of things, so I’m fully expecting there, that actually we’ve got 0.75 points to come and we’ve lost a half.

“So we’re looking there thinking, right, our score’s going to go up to 12.91, so didn’t know if that moved us to 10th or still kept to the 11th, I think, looking at this morning, I think he still would have kept to the 11th, but by a very small margin.”

This would be terrible news for Leigh Leopards who finished 12th and it would mean that they would lose their Super League status if the same occurs in a year’s time.

Either way, the Tigers aren’t happen with Grattan revealing an emergency meeting held after this:

“I spoke to Simon Johnson, the chairman; he said that they’ve got a board meeting the following morning, and they were looking at any suggestions, and nothing was off the table. So I went back and said, our suggestion is that your mistake masked our mistake. If you’ve not got your bit wrong to start off with, then we would have spotted there was an anomaly in finance and we would have, even with the funds going on, we would have dug deeper into that and we would have probably rectified that before the deadline.”