Revealed: Why Castleford Tigers plea failed at Liam Watts tribunal

Castleford Tigers Head Coach Craig Lingard has spoken out after the controversial suspension of Liam Watts following his equally controversially red carded against Wigan Warriors in Round One.

Lingard said in his weekly press conference that the Tigers are trying to not let it affect them. He said:

“We’re not really letting it impact us a great deal. It’s not impacting our training this week. To be fair to Wattsy, he’s been outstanding this week in training. He knows he’s going to be sitting down now for four weeks but he’s been outstanding in training this week.”

The Tigers are now without Watts for four games and he will have to pay a £750 fine this week.

Castleford Tigers boss reveals why tribunal went wrong

Castleford Tigers Head Coach has explained how the tribunal proceeded as the Tigers attempted to downgrade the charge but failed.

Lingard explained: “We went to downgrade it. There was no way we could get rid of it altogether because ultimately he had made contact with the ball carrier’s head, so we went in with mitigation.

“We thought that we had a decent case to answer. The mitigation was that we thought it was secondary contact, not secondary contact from him, but secondary contact from Joe Westerman that moved Tyler Dupree’s head into his tackling space.

“We also thought the height of Tyler Dupree coming into contact was a lot lower than his previous carries but as the wording in the points of mitigation states, it just says ‘player rapidly loses height’ or ‘unexpected to loses height’, which obviously wasn’t the case.

“So that meant that we couldn’t really use that.”

The Tigers this week meet Salford Red Devils in Round Two and will of course be without Liam Watts but will have more options in the spine.

This is because Lingard confirmed that the Tigers could have Rowan Milnes back in their 21-man squad which will be revealed tomorrow with the game set to take place on the Sunday with the squad revealed 48 hours in advance as per usual.

Both sides will be looking for a win after Round One defeats.