Opinion
Over the past three weeks, the Newcastle Knights were in for some tough battles.
They were against Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my years watching footy, anything can happen on the field.
Round 4: Canberra vs Newcastle
Newcastle hit the ground running and from the moment they took the lead the never surrendered it. From the opening minute with Bradman Best scoring, it looked like a battle Canberra weren’t prepared for.
From an 18-6 lead in the break, Knights looked like that team who won six in a row last year. After fighting off Raiders’ attempt of a spirited comeback, Newcastle took home the prize with the 34-18 win.
Round 5: Newcastle vs Melbourne
Sadly, Melbourne has shown why they’re our bogey team. Going down at the break 18-2, our first half wasn’t up to scratch against a team like Melbourne. Some errors and bad defence at times didn’t work for us.
In the second half Newcastle did their best to come back and almost pulled it off, but let it slip with a 26-12 loss. I really admired how well they played in the second half.
Round 6: Newcastle vs Brisbane
A Knight to remember with Newcastle fans savagely cheering “New-cas-tle” for the high heavens to hear, eager to see their players bounce back and happily letting Darius Boyd knows he sucks, the Newcastle Knights with a 27-6 win looked like they had it won in the first ten minutes.
With a 13-6 lead at the break, Newcastle came out firing with 14 unanswered second-half points. We could have played better but I believe if we hit second gear, we could have crossed 40.
Two wins and one loss. Even with the loss, I am absolutely amazed by how much our team has improved over these past 12 months.
Now with our next two matches, we have Cowboys in Townsville then Parramatta back at home in Marathon. I believe we can win those games but Parramatta have proven they’re not the easy beat wooden-spooners of 2018 and they look ready to demolish all those in front of them.
Now I’m not saying we have those matches won, I said can, not will. I don’t know what Adam O’Brien has done but it’s clearly working. I have talked about players with improvements and I have two to name, a back and a forward.
In the backs, Kurt Mann has improved the most and now settling in one position is making the most of it. For the forwards, my pick is Jacob Saifiti. He’s a very underrated player and every time he has the ball, he looks like he wants to smash through whoever is in front of him.
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