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Newcastle coach Adam O’Brien recently described his situation at the club as ‘hunting season’, a rare open admission of pressure from a man in one of the 17 most coveted jobs in Australian rugby league.
This weekend’s clash with the Bulldogs sets up a worrying situation for him: lose and it’ll be four on the spin and the final nail in the coffin of his side’s hopes of making the Finals, with a bye week to follow in which a new boss could be found.
“We’re getting to the point where, let’s be honest, we need to win footy games,” said O’Brien this week. He’s not wrong.
Coaching comes down to two things: winning now or winning in the future. If you’ve got part one right, disregard part two, but if you haven’t, then there has to be the feeling that something is building that will make part one more likely at some point.
There’s a marginal point three, which is play style, because fans do tend to be more forgiving of coaches that play entertaining footy, but given that Justin Holbrook just got sacked for scoring a shedload of points but losing anyway, it’s likely that we can ignore that for now.
Worryingly for O’Brien, he currently fails on all three fronts. Newcastle are currently 14th in the ladder and have just five wins all year, plus a draw.
Even of those five wins, one was against the Wests Tigers (when they really, really should have lost) and one was against a Manly side, in Origin, without Daly Cherry-Evans, Tom Trbojevic and Jake Trbojevic.
But then again: they lost to Penrith in Golden Point when they were more than good enough to win and lost to Brisbane in the last second under similar circumstances. They have mixed it with very good teams at times.
Separating results from performances across a long enough sample will usually result in the latter catching the former, but there’s no inclination to think that Newcastle will do that. They look about as good as they are, which is to say, the fourth worst team in the NRL.
So why are Newcastle bad? Is it Adam O’Brien the man to lead them out of it? And would sacking their coach change anything anyway?
The top line numbers are pretty unequivocal on this: Newcastle are bad. They don’t score enough points, the fourth least in the comp, in line with where they are on the ladder.
The defence isn’t dreadful – certainly not fourth worst in the league – but if you average 20 points a game, then it’s going to be a problem defending well enough to win.
(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
The shallowest of dives into the pointscoring produces one major outlier.
Newcastle, first and foremost, are the worst goalkickers in the league, and a single conversion more would jump them from 14th in attack to 9th on points per game – which is pretty damn substantial.
Canberra score a try fewer per game than the Knights, but score equal points, because the Raiders are the best kickers in the league. No wonder they win tight games when 91% of four pointers become six.
At Newcastle, Lachie Miller had a 67% success rate, which is bad, but since he was dropped, Jackson Hastings has taken over and he’s been abysmal at 57%.
It’s all the stranger because Kalyn Ponga kicked at 80% last year but is yet to even attempt one in 2023. That 80% was a bit of an outlier – he’s also been historically not the best – but he’s always been better than 57%.
The Knights have scored just two penalty goals, which could have moved the dial in several fixtures, especially for a team that doesn’t score many points. Kicking could be improved instantly by stopping Jackson Hastings and replacing him with Ponga, or really anyone else.
Unfortunately for O’Brien, the quick fixes stop there. The rest of the problems are endemic, and much more difficult to get a grip on.
Play style comes in here. Newcastle are not a bad side to watch – despite the lack of points – and do have a fairly distinct style of playing, based around winning the transition.
They love backline metres: 50% of all their metres are from the back five, not surprising when they have Greg Marzhew and Dom Young on the wings and Dane Gagai and Bradman Best in the centres. They start their sets brilliantly.
The point of the backline-heavy style is to allow the burden of metre-making to be spread across the team, and in that sense, it is working.
Newcastle’s hit-up percentage, a proxy for how much grunt work their middles are doing, is the third lowest at 39%, behind two other notably back five dominant sides in Penrith and North Queensland, and in contrast to the 44% at Parramatta and Souths, who prefer the power game.
Offensively, the middle does very little. Daniel Saifiti scrapes into the top 20 for middles metres and brother Jacob into the top fifty, but they’re the only Knights forwards to average 100m.
Kalyn Ponga. (Photo by Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images)
On metres per run (MPR), they’re miles off: Adam Elliott is the worst in the NRL bar none and Dylan Lucas, Leo Thompson, Jack Johns and Brodie Jones are all around seven per carry.
Elliott gets a pass because of sheer weight of carries – ten per game – but even that puts him in the Jake Trbojevic/Blake Lawrie zone of honest toilers.
Their MPR as a team is not dreadful – or at least, better than fourth worst – but if you split into forwards and backs, it’s clear which side is not pulling its weight.
That’s not always a bad thing. The upshot of the Knights’ style is that the middles should be doing less carrying and more tackling, which is where it all falls apart.
They’re dead last for metres conceded, which tells you pretty much everything. The points of the style is to allow the big men to do all the tackling, and they aren’t.
The outside backs do their bit here too: on line breaks conceded, Newcastle are fourth worst, but on tries conceded, only eighth, suggesting that the scramble defence is still there.
The location of the game, too, is a big problem. If you concede a lot of metres in the middle, then field position becomes an issue, but it’s often started by how you end your own sets.
Hastings is usually decent on attack, but in terms of defensive kicking, he’s not great at all and is tenth among regular kickers for metres off the boot and is right among the worst in terms of finding the floor.
That sets the Knights up for failure where the transitional game is concerned: their play five is bad, which means the opposition get a good start to their set, which means they can roll through the middle, and even when Newcastle start their set well in response, they end it badly, and it continues on.
When they get into good ball, they’re pretty efficient in turn it into points – it’s just that they don’t get there enough. It’s a fatal stylistic flaw.
The purpose of the backline-heavy style, transition-domination that O’Brien favours is to gradually win the arm wrestle and eventually the game. Watching them lose the transition to Penrith’s reggies last weekend told you everything you needed to know about that.
Bradman Best. (Photo by Ashley Feder/Getty Images)
There’s been a lot of investigation into the error rate – Newcastle are second bottom for completions – and while that will also heavily limit what a side can do collectively, it’s terminal for the style of football that the coach has them playing.
Plenty of teams can and do cope with a high error rate, because it’s baked into their style. Souths, Cronulla and Parramatta are hovering around the 75% mark, where the Knights are, but crucially, none are attempting to grind their way to victory.
Thus, while changing the coach will likely have zero effect on the errors, it might have an effect on the impact of the errors, and this is what the Knights board might be thinking about.
After four years in the job, he can’t make the excuse that it’s not his team, and increasingly, it looks like a side that has been built to play a style of football that they simply can’t execute.
Let’s start a thought experiment where O’Brien loses his job and is replaced by John Morris, or because the NRL loves chaos, Justin Holbrook.
Morris would be interesting, because his two previous engagements, with the Sharks and Rabbitohs, have been at clubs that prioritise their backlines – like the Knights do – but in different ways.
Given that Newcastle don’t make metres from their forwards, pivoting to a high-energy, agile pack like that at Cronulla and then using their backline earlier in the piece certainly would be entertaining. Their back five are a lot, lot better than fourth worst in the NRL and that could work.
Holbrook’s Titans never struggled to score points, either, and their issues as a team seemed more between the ears than with the footy. After a succession of great seasons in the Super League, there are worse options out there. Yes, that means you, Paul McGregor.
Perhaps, though, the best option is the one right under their nose. O’Brien assistant is Brian McDermott, a winner of four Super League titles with Leeds.
His sides were tough as all hell, with a huge unity of purpose between the players and no little entertainment too: they scored a full 30 more tries than their nearest competitors, Wigan, en route to winning a domestic treble of trophies in 2015.
They weren’t afraid to make errors, chuck offloads and promote the ball. McDermott might be sitting pretty, at least until the end of the year.
In many ways, it might be worrying for O’Brien that such a candidate is already in place. Lose to the Dogs this weekend and the board will likely find it too hard to keep him on, and they could avoid forking out for an interim.
The ground is getting shaky, and with the second part of the coaching equation disappearing, only results will do from here.