Newcastle Finished Last in 2025. A Year Later They Lost a Grand Final by One Point.
The Newcastle Knights won the wooden spoon in 2025. Thirteen months later they were four minutes away from a premiership, and they lost it 19-18.
Nobody has gone from last place to premiers since the 1930s. Newcastle got within a single point of it, and in March almost nobody outside the Hunter thought they would finish in the eight, let alone here.
They did it away from home, three times
The qualifying final was in Redcliffe against the Dolphins, who had finished third and had never lost a finals match because they had never played one. Newcastle won it.
The semi-final was at Eden Park against the Warriors, in front of 48,511 people who wanted the other result. Newcastle won that 12-10, and it did not finish cleanly: three late calls went their way and objects were thrown at the referees afterwards. Warriors coach Andrew Webster called it frustrating. Whatever else that match was, it was not the performance of a side that folds when a crowd turns on it.
Then came Penrith, the minor premiers, chasing a fifth grand final in six years.
The preliminary final will outlive the rest of it
Thirty-six minutes in, Phoenix Crossland was sent off for the tackle that broke Nathan Cleary’s leg. Newcastle played the whole second half with twelve men against the best team of the decade and scored three tries to none. Sandon Smith got two of them, one from a quick tap that caught Penrith with their backs turned, the other an eighty metre interception.
Crossland got four games at the judiciary and missed the grand final. Cleary had emergency surgery that night. Two halves, two seasons over, one tackle.
The detail that says the most about this team
Francis Manuleleua dislocated his elbow in Newcastle’s final regular season match on 30 August. He scored the opening try of the grand final thirty-five days later.
Kalyn Ponga, who had spent several seasons being discussed mostly in terms of contracts and fitness, ran ninety-five metres for the try that put his side 12-0 ahead. For half an hour on Sunday night Newcastle looked like the better team, and they were not flattering themselves.
Then the Roosters scored three times in twenty minutes and it was gone.
What happened in the Hunter the day before
On Saturday 3 October, a car crashed into a group of Knights supporters at a roundabout on Newcastle Link Road at Wallsend. Ten people were injured. Six went to hospital, among them a five year old girl in a serious but stable condition. An 18 year old driver was charged and refused bail.
Thousands travelled to Sydney the next day regardless. “They endured a lot through their trip to Sydney, getting the news through of what happened,” Newcastle mayor Gavin Morris said of the players. It is not why they lost, and it is not a storyline. It is just what that weekend was in Newcastle.
Twenty-five years of this
Newcastle have won two premierships, in 1997 and 2001. The second of them is the one people in the Hunter can still describe play by play: 24-0 up at half-time against Parramatta, 90,414 in the ground, the first night grand final the competition had staged, Andrew Johns taking the Clive Churchill Medal.
Sunday was the mirror image. They led at the break again, by a smaller margin, and this time they could not hold it. In between those two grand finals the club reached exactly one preliminary final, in 2013, and lost it.
Ponga said the right thing, which was also the true thing
“It hurts so much,” he said afterwards. “The amount of pressure they put on us, they were just too good.”
That is more generous than most losing captains manage, and it is also accurate. The Roosters did not steal this. The two refereeing calls people are arguing about both went Newcastle’s way, which is an awkward fact for anyone building a conspiracy out of a one point loss.
Can they get back?
Sides that climb this fast usually fall back. The season after a surprise grand final tends to be the hard one, because everybody has now watched the tape and nobody is underestimating you in round three.
The arguments for Newcastle are that the squad is young, the spine of Ponga and Sandon Smith is intact and under contract, and the thing they discovered this year was not a tactic but a habit: they won three knockout matches in a row, two of them interstate, one of them a man down. That is not form. Form goes away.
They will also start 2027 with something they did not have in 2026, which is everybody’s full attention.
