Chris Chester calls out Castleford Tigers player’s resilience after Salford Red Devils’ loss

Castleford Tigers interim head coach Chris Chester has called out his players for a lack of resilience after their loss to Salford Red Devils.

The Tigers fell to a 26-22 defeat with a late George Lawler try helping close the gap and plaster over what was an embarrassing performance against a Salford side who have plenty of their own troubles.

After the shock sacking of Danny McGuire, Chester was placed in charge on an interim duty and it looks like he has some job on getting a tune out of this team.

He did claim that the sacking of McGuire had no bearing on the performance of the players, something he described as “simply not good enough”.

Asked post-match if McGuire’s exit had an impact, Chester said: “No. Not at all. They’ve had a really good week of training. That had no impact whatsoever in the performance today. I thought we started well. But we just made too many errors.”

Giving his initial thoughts, he labelled it as “probably the story of the season”, bemoaning the lack of consistency.

Castleford Tigers coach highlights key turning point in tough loss to Salford

The Tigers almost scored after a minute but went behind to Ethan Ryan’s try after nine minutes and despite leading 10-6, never failed to get a foothold in the game.

“I thought we started the game very, very strong but we’re a team that can’t really handle any adversity,” Chester said in an honest review.

“We’re not resilient enough, and when we make an error, they just put some points on us, didn’t they?

“Just before half-time, there was a big turning point with a Jerry (Jeremiah Simbiken) knock-on over the line but it’s just simply not good enough, man.”

At 10-6 up, Simbiken was tackled brilliantly by Harvey Wilson and dropped the ball over the line in a very tight call, with Salford then going up the other end to score.

Despite that call going against them, Salford would score another before half-time as the Tigers looked to start their collapse and Chester has stated that it’s time for that to change at Castleford.

He argued: “We’ve got to take action, we are doing, off the field and we’re working hard for the recruitment as well to make sure we bring some tough, resilient players into the organisation.

“Like I said, we’re just not resilient enough, we’re not tough enough on ourselves. We’ve got to bring those kind of players into this club to get us back to a top six side.”

Full time.

We fall to defeat over in Salford. pic.twitter.com/2acRYdGS3q

— Castleford Tigers (@CTRLFC) July 13, 2025