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Newcastle great Andrew Johns says the Knights' surprise NRL grand final run is bigger than the club's 1997 premiership, as 22,000 fans prepare to fill McDonald Jones Stadium on Sunday night.
Newcastle great Andrew Johns says the Knights' charge to the NRL grand final is bigger than the club's first grand final in 1997, and he will not set foot in his home city this week to deliver any pre-game speech.
Justin Holbrook has asked him more than once this finals series to talk to the team, but he has declined, saying these Knights do not need a blubbering old halfback talking to them. Johns says he has lived and breathed the game in the Hunter his whole life, and even now he struggles to explain it. Rugby league is simply a way of life for so many people in this part of the world.
Newcastle's Rugby League Heart
He notices it most when he drives around places like Cessnock, Kurri Kurri, Singleton and Maitland, where the footy ground is always right in the middle of the town. Just like churches and cathedrals were built in the centre of a village because daily life revolved around religion, in the Hunter they worship beneath the crossbar. Rugby league began in northern England more than a century ago, and working-class roots run deep through both regions and the game itself.
Mining, a boom-or-bust industry, underpins both places and their people too. You think of the character this builds in a community. Think about how grim times could get in a mining town in the middle of winter. Resilience becomes a way of life, but so does 80 minutes of rugby league a week, when all your hard work at least involves a football.
Growing up in a rugby league family in a rugby league town, Johns and his brother Matthew did not look up to the superstars of the 1980s in Sydney. Their superheroes were Cessnock's first-graders every week. The Goannas were royalty in his town. So when Johns says this premiership charge is bigger than the club's first grand final in 1997, almost 30 years ago, he does not say it lightly.
A crowd of 22,000 will fill McDonald Jones Stadium to watch the grand final on Sunday night, and those tickets were gone in just three minutes. He says this year is bigger and better than 1997 because it is just such a surprise. No one, and he means no one, expected this. It is 2026, and life does not have fairytales any more.
A Grand Final Worth Waiting For
Luckily, sport, and Newcastle, still do. Johns would have considered 2026 a good season if the Knights had lifted themselves out of the bottom four. He certainly was not alone. Not that long ago he was asking himself when the club would compete for a grand final again, and whether it would happen in his lifetime.
After last year's wooden spoon, the Knights' fifth since 2001, you look for the common denominator throughout all of that. The only constant is the people of Newcastle and the Hunter. When the Knights finished stone motherless last in 2015, 2016 and 2017, home crowds still averaged more than 15,000. Last season that figure was still pushing almost 21,000.
The fans have turned up day-in, day-out, through the Nathan Tinkler and Wayne Bennett years, the thrashings and thumpings. They are just unbelievable. The way this Knights team plays reflects that commitment as well as any group of Newcastle players Johns has seen. With Jacob Saifiti out suspended, Dane Gagai, 35 years young and playing his final Knights game, is the last man standing from 2016.
That year the Knights won one single game all season. There was a game against Cronulla that year when Gagai had lost his grandma earlier in the week, been abused by his home crowd and lost 62-0 to the Sharks. He broke down that day 10 years ago. Gagai went to Souths, enjoyed great success and then came back to Newcastle, and he has always been a player who truly embraced the place.
Dane Gagai's Newcastle Connection
After 241 games for Newcastle, he deserves this grand final as much as anyone. Danny Buderus tells Johns that commitment involved Gagai buying himself a surfboard, because that is what you do in Newcastle, even if, like Gagai, you had no idea what to do with it.
That meant his teammates would paddle the board at the back of Merewether Beach for their star centre, and Gagai would then swim out the back and meet them, and then try to surf. Leading the connection between the club, town and masses has been Ponga. The raw emotion he has shown and the tears he has shed this finals series say it all.
He has embraced playing for Newcastle and playing for a higher cause like few others before, and the Knights have had an emblazoned photo of Ponga celebrating their round one Las Vegas victory in their dressing room all season. With four minutes left to go, he put his body on the line, belted a front-rower who is 15 kilos heavier than him and went outside his job title, because his teammates and his town needed him to.
If Newcastle pull off the fairytale victory against the Roosters in the grand final, that is what we will look back on as a premiership-defining moment. When Johns says these Knights do not need any pre-game address from him, it is because they have Kalyn. Johns watched the boys train at Olympic Park this week, and they were relaxed, composed and frankly a bit scary with how physical they were with each other.
Why Johns Will Stay Away
Kalyn and underrated, reliable forward Mat Croker were the guys holding court at the end of training. Johns is also a superstitious old No.7. Justin asked him if he would say something before the Souths game, but he held fire and the Knights got the job done. Now he will not dare think of straying from his pre-game routine, which means no speeches and no trips to Newcastle.
This team does not need all us old buggers firing them up anyway, he says. They know how proud the former players are to be represented by them, and guys like Paul Harragon and his brother are crying like babies on national television. The NRL grand final turned up to Knights training on Wednesday. The people of Newcastle and the Hunter region deserve this most of all.
They have a rugby league fairytale to believe in, in a time when fairytales were not meant to exist any more.
brisbanetimes 
smh:This Knights premiership charge is bigger than ’97. Which is why I won’t be talking to the teamThis story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
NRL Grand Final Kalyn Ponga Andrew Johns Dane Gagai
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