Super League: Refreshed Ben Crooks happy to be back in big time with hometown team Castleford Tigers
The centre has battled to make his way back after suffering rejection at Hull
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Your support makes all the difference.Every new Super League season offers a fresh start to some players, but rarely to one whose career had gone into reverse quite as badly as that of Ben Crooks.
Three years ago, Crooks had it all: a famous name, a legendary father, a glittering career stretching ahead of him. In 2013, he was voted one of the two best centres in Super League and its outstanding young player. At the age of 20, eventual progress to full England honours seemed to be a matter of time.
Yet within a year, his club, Hull, had sent him out on loan to humble Doncaster and did not seem very keen on having him back.
He grabbed a lifeline by signing for the Australian club Parramatta, but they seemed unimpressed as well, to the extent of farming him out to their feeder team, the Wentworthville Magpies.
He insists that he learned plenty from an experience he still regards as hugely beneficial: “But I went there to play first grade in the NRL and obviously I didn’t manage to do that.”
When, in June, his hometown club came enquiring about his availability, he needed no second invitation to come home. “I’d never had the chance to play for Castleford, but playing for the team you watched as a kid, it doesn’t get much better than that,” he said.
The relationship goes a lot deeper than the ordinary one between club, town and player as well. His father is Lee Crooks, one of Great Britain’s best forwards of the late 20th century, and his uncle is another Cas icon, Steve “Knocker” Norton.
That doesn’t win you any automatic favours in a rugby league-mad town like Castleford, just a guarantee that there will be lots of people willing to tell you that you aren’t a patch on the previous generation.
Crooks just about recalls his dad playing for Cas, but denies that he remains in his shadow while Crooks Snr controls his career, Svengali-like from the wings.
“He isn’t really all that involved. He’s just my dad, although we do discuss things after games,” Ben said.
There will also be a general suspicion that too much early success went to his head, as it has with a number of other Castleford – and, indeed, Hull – players, Lee Crooks included.
Even now, Crooks Jnr finds it difficult to put his finger on just why it all went so wrong. “I don’t think it was a case of it going to my head,’ he said. ‘I’ve always liked to think I was a pretty grounded kid. I’d come off a great year in 2013, but a year later I wasn’t in any sort of form and I wasn’t enjoying my rugby.”
Surprisingly, he enjoyed it a little more one division down with Doncaster, under the wing of a sympathetic Paul Cooke, himself the possessor of one of game’s most mercurial temperaments.
Crooks says that it was his mentoring that persuaded him to seek a way back to the level he had been playing at and give it a go in Australia. “It seemed like a great opportunity, but it just never worked out,” he said.
Now, back on familiar territory, he has grounds for believing that it will. Super League needs teams to over-achieve in order to give the season its narrative sweep and for the last two years it has been Cas who have done so.
Crooks points out that there have not been wholesale changes this year, so it does not seem to be a bad time to be joining the Tigers. Even with Justin Carney forced into exile following an affair with a team-mate’s wife, they have two wingers hungry for tries in Joel Monaghan and Denny Solomona, and they can thrive off the sort of pass he used to provide for Tom Lineham at Hull.
The scoring record of Lineham, who was selected along with Crooks in the 2013 Dream team and who makes a fresh start of his own for Warrington in the season-opener at the champions, Leeds, on Thursday, showed Crooks as a creator as well as a scorer of tries.
But Cas have a pair of established international centres in Michael Shenton and Jake Webster; Crooks will have to displace one of them to claim a place in the starting 13.
It is the likely challenge that will be faced by most players returning to Super League, the likes of Sam Tomkins at Wigan not excluded.
Castleford coach Daryl Powell has no doubts about Crooks’ long-term value to the club. “Ben is quick and athletic with great try-scoring ability,” he said. “We all feel he will fit neatly into the way we play.”
Crooks is guarding against impatience. “If I’m in the starting 13 on Sunday, I’ll be over the moon,” he says. “If not, I’ll wait for my chance to show what I can do.”
The new Super League season begins next weekend, with Castleford at Hull KR a week today
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