Powell reveals horror injury to one of his stars as “madness” ensues

Daryl Powell has revealed that captain Michael Shenton will be going to hospital tonight as a result of a facial injury suffered in Castleford’s 34-16 loss to Huddersfield.

The Tigers boss spoke highly of the skipper in what is a “tough situation” for the club in general.

“It’s so hard at the moment; we’ve got 15 players missing with COVID and another one injured,” Powell said.

“It’s just madness, but I thought we battled really hard tonight, and losing Shenny (Michael Shenton) was a massive blow.

“It looks a really bad injury for him – a facial injury – which is so disappointing for him and for us.

“We’re being forced to play games at the minute when we’ve got so many players sat out so this is a real tough situation.

“It looks like a facial fracture – it’s really badly swollen and it’s sore in a few points in his face.

“He will go to hospital now and we just hope he’s ok as he’s been an unbelievable champion for this club.”

Powell praised his side’s efforts, but called on his chargers to dig deeper in the coming weeks.

“We just couldn’t quite score when we needed to in the second-half and they ended up going the full length of the field and score.

“I can’t question our effort for certain, but we just can’t get a team together at the moment – either side of Wembley, COVID and that sort of stuff is as hard as I’ve seen it in the job I’ve been doing.

“We find ourselves with six-and-a-half weeks left and there are a lot of games in there, but we’ve got to find our spirit and determination to keep going.”

The Castleford head coach did save praise for a number of his players.

“We started off with people out of position and all over the place and then we had to move people again, but I thought Cain Robb was great again – he’s a warrior that kid.

“He’s pretty small and there were big lessons for him, but as a team we worked hard – the start at the second-half was really good for us and we scored the last try so we kept going.

“I thought Paul McShane was fantastic throughout and kept things going for us and there were some young players in there whilst Niall Evalds played well and was dangerous and Derrell Olpherts’ efforts were massive today.

“I thought Jimmy (Keinhorst) and Jake (Sweeting) did pretty well and they both had one training session.

“I thank those guys for coming, that’s really tough to ask new people to do that and play well, but both did really well.”