March 12, 2022 was the beginning of the Newcastle Knights’ season.
Entering their first season since Mitchell Pearce left, Newcastle were seen by most experts as written off.
They entered their third encounter at the Sydney Cricket Ground, suffering two previous floggings from the hosting Sydney Roosters.
Without their first-choice captain Jayden Brailey and forward pack leader Daniel Saifiti, many were expecting the Knights to suffer their third slaughter in just as many appearances as the SCG.
The scoreline says otherwise.
On the field, Newcastle showed the ruthless aggression that us fans love to see.
(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
Winning the line-break battle and the metres, and having a 93 per cent tackle efficiency, the Knights gave a nice theoretical one-finger salute to all those writing them off.
The biggest test was when they were down to 12 men for ten minutes and they held the Roosters out for the duration of that period Phoenix Crossland had to spend in the sin bin.
They played the game our way and kept control of the match.
For the fifth year in a row, Newcastle have won their season-opening match and just like their previous four season-opening victories, they broke a streak.
It was 12 years since they had defeated the Roosters outside of Newcastle and 13 since they had defeated the Roosters on their home ground. That was in 2010 and it was in Gosford.
I’ll give the Roosters their due credit. Their defence for most of the game was on point and Newcastle may have scored four tries, but only twice cracked their goal-line defence. The two other tries came off Roosters errors.
Newcastle have got a whole season of improvement left.
Not to play to play the pessimistic card, but I ask all Knights fans to please not get ahead of themselves. I have seen some comments saying it’s our year this year and to get the grand final tickets.
Our next match is next Sunday at home to the Wests Tigers. Wests may be coming off a loss to Melbourne but they played well for most of the game so I urge Knights fans to not get too arrogant and write them off.
Our season had a brilliant start, I won’t doubt that, but we have got a long season ahead of us. We’ll take it each game as it comes.
Choppy Zezers
Roar Rookie
Bugger that. I've got so far ahead of myself I've caught up to myself. Cliff Clune combo. Bradman Gagai the centres of excellence. The Young One. Fitzell. It's a team for for ages. We should probably rest KP this weekend and still win in a canter.
Forty Twenty
Roar Rookie
Save the one-finger salute until the end of the season, I'd say.
Albo
Roar Rookie
Whilst the Knights fans can take some heart from this good first round victory, you can't get too carried away just yet. I think the Knights might have got a bit lucky with a few bounces of the ball and the Chooks were well below their par. The positive things for the Knights were the strong performance by Clifford running the show, the much better involvement by Ponga , the use of Mann at 13 looked promising , and winger Young just needs to get more ball in his hands.
PGNEWC
Roar Rookie
It was good to see KW but there was a lot of luck with some of the Stuff. Gagai's try was off a disaster bounce for Teddy and Easts kept dropping the ball and I don't think they were match fit. Still Besty and Gagai were a revelation and the halves didnt look wooden and uncreative like everybody was predicting --Man support to them from lock was positive - which might be his best position . However When The knights have started like this post Joey era they often fall away by the middle of the season. If O'Brien can keep them consistant and Ponga motivated then anythings possible