Belief is growing says Castleford Tigers boss Craig Lingard

While the 28-28 result highlighted there were still areas the team needed to improve it showed again that the Tigers are becoming more competitive after a difficult start to the season – and it showed the spirit has remained intact after they battled back from 28-16 down with two well executed late tries.

"​If you asked me midway through the first half I’d say (it feels like) a point dropped,” said Lingard. “But if you asked me in the second, I’d say a point won.

“I thought we were lucky to be 10 points up in the first half because Leigh had dominated in attack and defence. I had to question the players’ physicality at half-time because Leigh were winning the battle.

"We have talked about developing and toughening our mentality of competing and we played well in spells, but not for the full 80 minutes.

"Those periods of the game are getting bigger and the bad ones are getting smaller. But we are sort of getting there – the last couple of games have given us some confidence and a little bit of belief that what we are doing is right.

"What we have got to do is make sure that we don’t deviate from the plan that we’ve got and keep pushing through.

"Some of the guys weve got here at the minute we’ve got confidence we can develop and be successful long term.”

Lingard added: “We’ve got to be realistic in what are aims and ambitions are. I’m not saying that we don’t want to be at the top end of the table, but we’re realistic about how long potentially it’s going to take us to get there.

"We’ve had two real good weeks and there’s going to be times when we have a bad week so we’re not going to be on this consistent trajectory where we’re getting better week on week and we’re going to be a top six team straight away. It doesn’t work like that.

"But what we are doing is we’re asking the guys to compete with the good periods in the game getting longer. If we get 50 per cent of the possession we’ll trouble teams.”

Cas now face a tough task when they host St Helens this Friday and could be without two more players who were injured at Leigh with prop Sam Hall failing a head assessment and centre Sam Wood suffering a thumb injury.