Shenton sets high targets for improving Cas

Castleford won’t be happy unless they’ve won their last four matches of the season according to captain, Michael Shenton.

The Tigers take on Widnes, Salford, Bradford and Wakefield over the next five weeks and Shenton says a 100% record from those games will emphasise their improvement under Daryl Powell.

“I think we’re making massive progress,” he said. “Daryl has put a few things into place at training but it takes a little bit of time to transfer that to the field.

“We want to finish the season on a high. We thought in the middle part of the season that we’d turned everything around but we hit a tough run of fixtures and that knocked our confidence.

“We’ve recorded some good wins against Wigan and Hull and we put 40 minutes together against Warrington and Huddersfield. 

“If we were able to replicate that in the second half, we’d have beaten them so we need to focus on putting in an 80 minute performance for our remaining games.

“Hopefully we can get four out of four – that’s what we are going for and if we don’t get that, we’ll be bitterly disappointed.

“It’s clear that there’s progression but if we can end the season on a good run, we’ll build confidence for next season.” 

Whilst Shenton says the team are living up to their nickname of “Classy Cas”, he was quick to identify that their defence is the problem.

“I think people who watch us will enjoy it because we are good in attack and score some points,” he added. “Our downfall is our defence and at times we’re a little dumb. 

“We gave ourselves a great chance against Warrington last weekend with some great attacking play but we spoke at half-time about clawing our game back a little.

“We want to get into a battle with teams but we haven’t been consistent enough in our defence at the minute.

“The effort was great but you can’t give Warrington as much ball as we did especially when our defence has been patchy.”