Give us 10: Knights' revival restores faith in the Hunter

After compiling just six wins in 2022 and limping into 14th position, pretty much anything Adam O’Brien’s Knights dished up this season was going to be seen as an improvement.

The quest for redemption started well enough with two wins and a draw through the first five games, but what followed in the ensuing 12 rounds had Knights fans in a cold sweat and O’Brien feeling the heat.

Taking the gloss off wins over the Warriors, Titans and Manly were humbling losses to the Eels and Sharks and heartbreakers against the Panthers and Cowboys.

By the time the premiers had rolled them in Round 17, the men from the Hunter were languishing in the dreaded 14th again, short on answers but not short on a willingness to find them.

“It’s frustrating for players, frustrating for staff, we shot ourselves in the foot with some execution and “we got a bit panicky,” said O’Brien in the wake of the 20-12 defeat at BlueBet Stadium.

“The boys are there swinging away, we need to stick together and stay tight and make it turn.

“If there was an easy fix, I would have fixed it. We plug a hole and then another leak spouts the next week but we won’t run away from it.”

Blocking out the external noise about his own job and focusing on the fact his main man Kalyn Ponga was back at fullback and slowly finding his best after specialist treatment in Canada for ongoing concussion issues, O’Brien set about the rebuild.

Thumping wins over the Bulldogs and Wests Tigers in which they piled on 100 points to 18 served to remind his men they knew how to attack.

Then came a season-defining come from behind win over the Storm in front of the McDonald Jones faithful in Round 21 in which Ponga ran for 191 metres and Tyson Frizell stood tall.

The Knights had climbed to 10th, just one point outside the eight, and the Newcastle Express out of Broadmeadow was finally off and running.

"The Storm scored the first two tries, and it takes a fair bit against quality opposition like that to be behind and remain composed and get back into our process and come out the other side," O’Brien said last week.

“I think that gave them a lot of belief that our footy does hold up.”

With wingers Dom Young and Greg Marzhew scoring tries for fun, Bradman Best coming of age before our eyes after his Origin debut, and Ponga being Ponga, the push for a miracle finals berth was on in earnest.

After a close shave against the Dolphins in Perth, the Knights rode the emotion of three sellout home crowds in three weeks to take down the Bulldogs, Rabbitohs and Sharks before completing a remarkable turnaround with a win over the Dragons in Round 27.

What seemed a forlorn hope just 10 weeks earlier had been transformed into a fifth-place finish and a home final against the Raiders was the reward for hanging tough.

With their loyal fans in full voice the Knights got home 30-28 in a pulsating elimination final before the fairytale was shattered by Shaun Johnson’s rampant Warriors in Auckland.

In the immediate aftermath of the 40-10 loss, O’Brien was eager to talk up the enormous effort by his men to even make it that far, but adamant they had still fallen short of the desired outcome.

‘We didn’t deserve to end like that, but we deserved to end like that,” he mused.

“We can’t just walk away from that season, we’ve set some high standards, we need to go at that again. Just being content with this is not good enough.

“That’s not who we are, that’s just something that happened to us tonight.

“We’re at the start. We were never going to build it straight away but we’ve taken a good step in the right direction.”

Sitting at his coach's right shoulder, his right-hand man Ponga reflected on a year that began with concerns for his playing future after a fourth concussion in 10 months, and finished with him stepping forth to lead his men to 10 on the bounce.

Having sat out the Origin series with Queensland to ensure he could give his best to his club, Ponga could be content he had done that and more as he rediscovered his passion for the game.

"I'll be proud after what I had to go through at the beginning of the year and then what I've done in the back end," Ponga said.

"I'm just grateful that the coaches, everyone believed in me, and I was able to play footy that I didn't let anyone down I feel.

"That was the main thing after I came back from all my concussions that I didn't let people down.

"There's a core group now within the team now that we are all on same page and all want the same thing and we will carry that into next year.

"We wanted to keep riding the wave. That loss should drive us into next year. Losing that way might sit bitter for a lot of people and it should.

"It should drive us."

And as he showed time and again during the past three months, a driven Kalyn Ponga is a very scary proposition for his rivals.