Ten years after their lowest ebb, Newcastle are one win from salvation

The outpouring of emotion following Newcastle’s return to the grand final after 25 years is proof you can’t understand how good winning can feel until you’ve lost a few times.

The Knights know it better than most because in the quarter-century since their glory days they’ve lost hard and lost plenty.

Before this season there’d been more wooden spoons than finals wins over the past two decades, survived financial turmoil that threatened the club’s very existence and persevered through other struggles that proved there’s more to life than football, even in Newcastle.

But on the field the times were never harder than ten years ago, when the club won just a single game for the entire 2016 season, the equal fewest victories for a team in the past 60 years.

There’s two men left standing from that leanest of winters and while Jacob Saifiti will miss Sunday’s grand final through suspension, Dane Gagai has the chance to bury the old pain under a mountain of grand final glory.

The 2016 season was the lowest point amid three-straight last-placed finishes, but what Gagai remembers most is the indomitable hope of the faithful, against all odds and good sense.

“The fans still kept turning up. There was still 20,000 people at a game, Knights jerseys on, even after back-to-back spoons,” said Gagai.

“To be able to be in this position now and give these fans what they deserve, I couldn’t be more proud to be a Newcastle Knight.”

It’s a similar story for Trent Hodkinson, who captained the Knights that season after arriving from Canterbury as the incumbent New South Wales Origin halfback

“I was excited to get there, I really like that it was a one-team town, seeing how they got behind their team — I wanted to be a part of that,” said Hodkinson.

“The first thing that comes to mind is the loyalty from the fans. No matter how tough we were doing it on the field they’d rock up in numbers.

“We were trying our best to win for them, we really were, but we were deep in that rebuilding phase. The times on the field were so tough but the fans got us through it.”

Both men are right about the support never wavering given the Knights had higher average crowds that season than three teams who made the finals.

They also, somehow, experienced an overall lift in crowds from the year before and had a higher average attendance than the club did in their 1997 premiership season.

All the players and fans had was their faith, which is just another way of saying they had one another, and few teams have ever needed it more.

Only six of their games were decided by less than one score and they conceded 24 points or more in 19 of their 24 matches.

There were special horrors that would rear their heads up from time to time that made the campaign seem like less of a bad season and more of a divine punishment, like an ironic torture dreamed up in the sick mind of a wicked and vengeful God.

Their sole win came in Round 6 against Wests Tigers, when a fan threw a ball on the field and prop Korbin Sims toed it through to force an error from Tigers winger Jordan Rankin as he tried to field a bomb.

The Knights scored from the ensuing set to claim an 18-16 victory but the next month was a taste of hell, as if they were being tormented for their one day of good fortune, for daring to have one happy day.

They lost their next four games by a combined margin of 179-10 and were kept scoreless three times.

The final match, a 62-0 loss at home to Cronulla, was the second heaviest defeat in club history.

Gagai played despite his grandmother passing on the morning of the match and broke down in tears in Sims’s arms afterwards after he was racially abused by a member of the crowd.

Tariq Sims, who began the season as one of the club’s co-captains, left on a mid-season transfer to St George Illawarra a few weeks later and Jarrod Mullen, the club’s most experienced player, had his NRL career end months later after testing positive to steroids.

There were some days that were closer than others, but only close enough to make it sting all the more and show there can be no true despair without a little piece of hope.

Newcastle took Canberra, who finished the regular season second and ended up in the preliminary final, to extra time twice. They did manage, as a squad, to outscore Raiders centre Jarrod Croker, who finished as that year’s top point-scorer but given it was 306 to 296 it was a close run thing.

In their last game of the season, when a win might have meant most of all, the Knights conceded a last-second penalty to lose to St George Illawarra and confirm their status as one-win wonders.

There was talent enough on the Knights roster to be competitive — Gagai was a Queensland regular by that point and won the club’s player of the year award, his first taste of being a stand-out soldier for a hopeless cause.

“Back then he was exactly like he is now — a true competitor who worked his backside off at training and always tried to help the young guys through,” said Hodkinson.

“He’d try so hard, he’d do whatever it took to try and get a win for the team and the town.”

Gagai and Hodkinson were just two of 12 players on the roster who would play Origin or for Australia or New Zealand at some point in their careers.

But none of the timelines matched up. Some of them were too young — Mitch Barnett and the Saifiti twins were in their first year of first grade.

Others were too old — Kade Snowden, Jeremy Smith and Mullen were all in the final year of their NRL careers and under coach Nathan Brown the mix was never right.

“The new guys, they were up for it, they were next in line, but they were just young,” Hodkinson said.

“They did everything they could and I feel for a few of them but some of them have gone on to great careers — Josh King down at Melbourne, Jack Cogger is going great at Penrith, both Saifiti’s turned into great players.

“But when you have more youth than experience it makes it hard, especially when the roster and combinations keep changing.”

Given the team was unable to give back to the community in glory, Hodkinson worked hard to find other ways to repay the love that meant so much.

His work in the community with ill children, including escorting 15-year old Hannah Rye to her high-school formal while she had terminal cancer in 2017, served as a constant reminder that rugby league could be bigger than winning and losing.

“That made some tough times on the field a lot easier, it put things in perspective when you know kids out there are doing it much, much tougher than anyone who’s playing football for a living,” said Hodkinson.

“The fans and the club were so great to me. In a tough time they were such a positive part of my life.

“Me and my wife still speak about it now, because we loved Newcastle, we loved the people. Off the field, we wouldn’t change a thing.”

It’s been a winding way back for the Knights, who went to the finals and back to last place over the course of the next ten years.

Hodkinson was released at the end of 2017, just before Kalyn Ponga arrived and the long march to Sunday began.

Saifiti is the only player on the roster who’s been there all the way after Gagai eventually left for South Sydney at the end of 2017 in search of winning football.

His return four years later to the club he’ll always call home was that of a prodigal son and a premiership would be a reward he’s earned a thousand times over, just like it would be for the fans who were with the team during those darkest days.

Ten years after one win was all they had, one more win can mean everything and would prove that true salvation comes to they who can suffer the most without losing the faith.

“I want it. I want it bad. But that’s the end product of what needs to be done,” said Gagai.

“A lot of people have been putting us as the underdog. But we’ve never done that, we’ve had that belief throughout the whole year.

“To be able to come back and play in a grand final here, I couldn’t be more proud to be a Novocastrian.”

dan