KEY POINTS:
HUDSON HIT: Hudson Young was placed on report and sent to the sin-bin for a late high shot on Kalyn Ponga.
Ponga had skipped down field midway through the first half and passed to Tyson Gamble when he was flattened by Young. The hit looked worse in slow-mo.
Ponga’s concussion history always adds to the anxiety whenever he is hit in the melon, or what referee Todd Smith called “totally unnecessary”.
Raiders coach Ricky Stuart was struggling to work out what the sin-binning was for, and asked: “Pushing?”
“The buzz word is ‘discretionary’, isn’t it” It was a discretionary decision,” Stuart said.
“Penalise him, but if we’re going to start sin-binning people for that, we’ll play a lot of games with 12 [players].”
BAD KNIGHTS: Maybe Newcastle over-achieved last year and we were all getting a bit carried away with their actual ability. They were expected to win, and win easily, but they were poor, and basically dominated after 15 minutes. They barely looked like scoring. You don’t have to be Einstein to realise a team rarely wins when they complete at nearly less than 70 per cent. The Cowboys, Storm and Warriors await.
PAPALII FUTURE: Josh Papalii is 31 and it remains to be seen what happens beyond this season. But he is still a weapon, and his play to shove Greg Marzhew back into the in-goal midway through the second half ended any chance of a Knights’ comeback. The Raiders pack is in good shape. Joe Tapine is a machine, Zac Hosking an excellent pick-up, while Hudson Young has that mongrel Ricky Stuart loves. Never write off the Stickman and the Green Machine.
WHAT THE COACHES SAID:
NEWCASTLE’S ADAM O’BRIEN: “Our game lacked any sort of grit. We were impatient, and it felt like we wanted the highlight reel, while the other mob, when you score four tries on the last play, and they were scrappy tries, but they wanted to come here and get into a scrap, and I don’t reckon we did.
“We got a lesson in what wins the first month of footy, and that’s high completions, working hard all the way through to the end of the set, and not looking for the easy way out.”
RAIDERS COACH RICKY STUART: ”It’s only game one. It’s been a fun off-season, all the younger players have rejuvenated [the club], and [added] energy, and when the senior boys come back after their World Cup commitments and break, they took training to another standard. I have to credit the buy-in of the whole group.”
