Super League club Castleford Tigers finally got their first win of the 2024 season but it came against a Championship side in the shape of coach Craig Lingard’s former club Batley Bulldogs.
There has been a lot of discussion about the Castleford Tigers‘ woes to start the season and the suggestion that the Tigers aren’t investing to win at present.
This was something Lingard addressed this after the game against Batley in the Challenge Cup as the Super League club picked up their first win.
He said on BBC Sport West Yorkshire: “We’ve got to do that. I’ve said it a number of times, with the club concentrating on off the field this season, making sure that there’s a Super League future for Castleford Tigers, which is the right thing to do.
“Maybe it should have been done years ago but it’s not been done years ago and we need to make sure that we hit them points now to make sure that Castleford are in the Super League next season and then we can start building from there.
“We are developing players this season, we have got inexperienced players and we know that. I guess we can maybe liken it a little bit to our youth development at the minute where I think they’d agree that over the last sort of seven or eight years, the youth development at Castleford has been neglected a little bit but they started that process two or three years ago and now we’re seeing the fruit start coming through.”
Super League club unable to secure immediate success
Credit Imago Images
He said that the club were unable to achieve “instant success” because they can’t spend “millions of pounds.”
He said: “Things don’t happen overnight, you’ve got to put the long hard yards in and you can’t expect immediate success unless you’re spending millions of pounds to get that immediate success. We know it’s going to be a long drawn-out process and it’s going to be a two or three-year project until we get to where we hopefully are going to get.
“We’re pretty confident and comfortable with the plan that we’ve got and hopefully the patience will be there with not only us as coaches and the players and the supporters and the directors as well. We’re going to see that through to the end because you don’t get anything easy. It’s going to be a lot of hard work and a lot of long roads that we need to go down to make sure that we tick that box that we need to tick.”
