“Thank you, next…”

So here we are again. Doris the tea lady arrives at Wheldon Road in the morning, shuffles over to the dusty sign in the corner and, like a depressing version of The Simpsons opening credits, resets the counter on the ‘230 days since we last sacked a coach’ back to zero. Groundhog Day.

I was a little shocked when I got a text on Monday asking, ‘What do you think of McGuire being sacked?’ It might sound shocking to be shocked when the coach of a team that’s tenth in the table loses at home to a very poor side one place below them after a disappointing season gets the boot, but in the context of the season, and the experimental nature of McGuire’s appointment, it feels odd to have given up on a rookie coach now. The loss to Huddersfield did feel a bit like the crossing of the Rubicon. I have to say, as a spectacle it was possibly one of the worst games I’ve ever seen — something McGuire said himself — and the team was so dull, lifeless and unmotivated that I did think to myself, he might have just lost the dressing room. It was bad.

It’s hard to temper because as Cas fans we know we’ve very little budget and expectations aren’t high, but the complete lack of any real identity on the pitch, or familiar structures, or for want of a better word, philosophy, shown on Thursday felt like the most damning demonstration of something that has haunted us all season.

McGuire seemed dejected afterwards and maybe there was part of him wondering if he felt that he could really do anything more with the tools at his disposal. Gone was the passion from the post-match interview following the controversial defeat to Wigan. He’d seemed so passionate and intense only a week before that it even transcended perhaps into desperation.

But that’s the thing — McGuire has always been desperate to win. He’s a serial winner, and he found himself in charge of a club that is... well, I think I’m allowed to say this as a Cas fan, but we’re not a team of winners by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve never been able to escape the feeling that when you’re a born winner like McGuire and land a job at a club that doesn’t really win anything, you’re likely doomed to fail. Maybe being in charge of the Tigers is the only job that could finally break the spirit of a man who won eight Grand Finals. Welcome to Cas, Danny. We get it.

It’s all been quite difficult to process. McGuire came in under strange circumstances and given his Leeds Rhinos heritage, was viewed as a suspect appointment from the more parochial element of our fanbase. To me, this was a moot point to begin with as he is the ultimate professional, and when you watched him in the first game, living and breathing every kick, tackle and pass in his first televised game, you did wonder if it’d take its toll on him. It must be a tough gig being the coach of a struggling side.

That said, it’s been a rough, tough couple of years as a Cas fan. From the now luxurious stability of Daryl Powell’s tenure, the club — and more importantly the fans — have experienced a tumultuous rollercoaster of appointments to endure, each one a more abject failure than the last for a different set of reasons, whether that be the playing staff, coaching staff, or an ill-advised appointment from the board of directors.

It’s certainly worth a step back in time to trace the lineage and see how we got here. Powell’s exit was followed by Lee Radford’s arrival in 2022, who had a reasonable first season after a shaky start, finishing just one game away from the play-offs. Things got a bit weird in the off-season when Radford, who had coaching commitments with Samoa in the World Cup, decided to take an extended stay of leave to celebrate reaching the final, leaving his assistant Andy Last in charge. Something felt decidedly off and rumours were doing the rounds that Radford had designs on another job at the end of his contract. After a disastrous start to the campaign, he left.

The caretaker coach was Last who, despite winning only one game in a couple of months, was somehow appointed permanently. It seems that all you have to do as a Cas coach is beat Leeds once and you’re considered a tactical genius.

As Last’s Cas ploughed towards relegation, a humiliating loss against Huddersfield made the BOD realise they’d appointed the wrong man, cancelled the statue of him to commemorate our stunning cup win over the Rhinos, and brought in former London coach and ex-player Danny Ward, who managed to get the Tigers over the line and oversaw an invaluable win over Wakefield that all but ensured survival.

At the end of 2023 you could possibly reframe it all as a blip and hope the club would learn from their lessons. It seemed inevitable that an ambitious coach like Ward would get the job, rebuild, rip out the dead wood and begin a rebuild. Given his absence from coaching after leaving London Broncos, combined with the relative scarcity of top jobs in RL, you’d think a Super League head coaching gig would be sought after. Ward, by all accounts, turned down the job.

It left many Cas fans wondering if he saw more internal issues than we could and cast the role as a bit of a poison chalice. Whatever the reason for him giving the club a wide berth and joining Hull KR as an assistant — given their subsequent success it seems the correct decision — it left the club to promote the likeable and hard-working Craig Lingard to the head coach role. A certain Danny McGuire was appointed as his assistant, despite rumours he’d turned down the top job himself, choosing to gain a little more experience before taking over a hotseat somewhere himself.

With a respectable eight wins under his belt, Lingard guided the team to tenth in 2024, which was an improvement on the previous year and more notable for the fact that the squad was assembled well below the salary cap and Lingard had managed to do well without any real star players. But a change of ownership saw Martin Jepson swing the axe, citing that he felt the 2025 season needed a “new voice in the dressing room”.

Obviously, the prime candidate for a new voice was the assistant coach already in the building. So Danny McGuire it was. That’s right, a bloke who sat in the same room as Lingard for an entire calendar year. Who knew he’d been sitting quietly for twelve months with a muzzle on, saying nothing at all, full of ideas and solutions for all the things Lingard couldn’t spot, deciding to keep them to himself?

The main problem is that McGuire inherited the bulk of the same team Lingard had, and despite the appointment of the highly-rated Brett Delaney as defensive coach, the recruitment plan was essentially more of the same from 2024. No real budget to work with, a host of unproven Queensland Cup players having to step up to Super League, plus a couple of loan signings.

And so we all know how 2025 has turned out so far: predominantly grim viewing starting with the embarrassment of being knocked out of the Challenge Cup by Championship side Bradford and ending with a loss to a terrible Huddersfield team. Fixtures against Huddersfield have been a graveyard for Cas coaches, and a home loss to the Giants has been the final straw for Ian Millward, Andy Last and now Danny McGuire.

I’ve sort of bored myself a little typing this Eastenders’ style narrative out, lurching from one failure to another, but I think it’s important to look at this history to get to the real crux of it. A big part of life is learning from your previous mistakes, and it’s something that the club seems incapable of.

I’m not sure if Cas’ BOD have been spoiled by Daryl Powell’s knack of turning the proverbial silk purse from a sow’s ear — see Liam Finn, Marc Sneyd, Greg Minikin, Mitch Clark or any of the other numerous lower league players Powell managed to get performing at a high level — but the club seem to genuinely expect anyone in the hotseat at The Jungle to win poker games with weak hands. We’ve got a team of squad players — they’re all alright as back-ups or stand-ins, but not the sort of names you could build a 1-17 around.

Powell was an experienced coach with a proven track record at Leeds and Featherstone. I’m not sure exactly what Jepson’ expected of McGuire. The playing budget dwindled over the years under former owner Ian Fulton in order to focus on the IMG improvements, something that was a necessary evil and understandable, even if it did lead to such poor showings on the playing front. It clearly left the club well behind the eight ball in terms of being an attractive proposition for new signings, something unlikely to change any time soon.

It leaves me curious in what ways McGuire has been deemed to underperform given his limited resources. Had Jepson come in and ‘done a Koukash’ with a host of marquee signings and a blank cheque book then fair enough, but he’s essentially inherited a team that finished tenth, and it currently stands in *checks notes* ah yes... tenth. With no increase in the playing budget, and — with the exception of Salford — everyone else getting their act together, what exactly was Jepson hoping to achieve by July 2025?

It did feel like at times McGuire’s post-match comments were harsh on the players. He emphasised frequently that they’d trained well but were unable to take the tactical elements onto the pitch and execute his plays and ideas. It’s difficult because he himself perhaps expected too much from the playing roster he had, but it begs the question: can you meet in the middle? Can players of a lesser quality rise to the demands, or should a coach come up with a Plan B when Plan A clearly isn’t working?

It’s a cruel sport with fine margins, and you can’t help but wonder how different the picture would have been with a few different bounces of the ball. Cas have been beaten easily on a few occasions, but if a missed goal from Tex Hoy in round one at Hull KR, a missed goal kick against Wakefield away, and an appalling call from Aaron Moore against Wigan went the other way, suddenly it’s not looking quite as terrible a season.

The crux is, this didn’t start with Danny McGuire. The rot set in when Daryl Powell’s winning team aged, drifted apart and were replaced with poor signings who were either too old, too unfit or just not good enough. Loan players such as Dan Okoro or Hugo Salabio are decent, but while Andy Last and Lee Radford’s sides had a real Dad’s Army vibe to them with Gareth Widdop, Mahe Fonua and Bureta Faraimo limping about for eighty minutes, the Lingard and McGuire era replaced these ageing big names with fringe players. And that’s probably where we are in a nutshell on the playing front, a 1-17 predominantly full of players who should be 18-25 in a Super League squad — complementing quality, not relied upon to provide it. The Powell years were dined off for too long, and the chopping, changing and chaos that has ensued stems from a failure to build on those achievements.

From nine years under one coach to five coaches in four years, it’s quite the turnaround. The one constant in most of this has been Danny Wilson. Wilson’s reign as director of rugby involved him signing the sort of players who will make great pub quiz question answers in the future. The turnover rate of his signings has been astonishing. The past few seasons have seen the club resemble an NFL side with squad numbers up in the forties regularly, something that has always been a sure fire sign to me that, aside from a truly disastrous injury crisis, clubs with squad numbers regularly running that high are in trouble. You slide towards the status of banter club when your half-back pairing are numbers 41 and 42.

This scattergun approach of Wilson’s recruitment, with many short-term signings seemingly reliant on his connections in Humberside, has left many to think he’s been truly underwhelming in the role. One of the few positives is Chris Chester taking over in that position earlier this year, and providing Jepson doesn’t end up just giving him the job as head coach permanently, will hopefully provide a similar transformation to the impressive rebuild he helped achieve at Leigh. Meanwhile, Wilson has somehow managed to earn a promotion to CEO, surely the definition of failing upwards. Jepson has promised more professionalism, and that has to come in. The whole club needs work from top to bottom.

If this whole piece comes across as glib, it’s probably more just being jaded from years of bizarre decision-making and mismanagement from the previous and current owners, and a sense of disconnect it creates when something you love is so badly mismanaged. There have been so many sliding doors moments when we had real forks in the road and picked the wrong direction. It all probably started after Zak Hardaker was banned on the eve of the 2017 Grand Final. Instead of building on the success and investing in a quality player, or being bold and aiming for a marquee signing to slot in at full-back, we signed budget projects from the Championship and the decline started there. I never felt Radford was right for the job, and I was genuinely angry when Last replaced him after six weeks of getting towelled in his ‘trial’ period. Lingard seemed a reasonable appointment, but it was baffling to replace him with another unproven coach with no budget to work with only to sack him too.

McGuire didn’t start the rot, and the reason for this trip down a pretty miserable memory lane isn’t sheer nostalgia, it’s just to emphasise that really he’s just been the wrong coach at the wrong time and this is the culmination of poor decisions that trace back to that fated 2017 team who came so close to glory. He should have been appointed for the long term or not at all. Jepson and Wilson can’t talk about three-year plans and maintain their credibility when they don’t stick to those plans.

Time proves everything, and McGuire’s departure will either look like a masterstroke or another pointless change on the conveyor belt of Cas coaches. So who’d want the job now? Steve McNamara? Ian Watson? Paul Rowley? It’s not an easy task. I just hope whoever comes in next is given a decent budget, a little bit of time, and gently puts a circle around the fixture list when we play Huddersfield at home to make sure they bring their A-game and keep their job. ⬧

More Castleford Tigers: Hang this photo of Dean Sampson flattening Willie Poching in the Louvre