The nib Newcastle Knights played their first home game last night at McDonald Jones Stadium, going down 36-20 to the Dolphins.
Three players made their NRL debut with many of the first graders sidelined due to injury.
Head Coach Adam O'Brien spoke after the game on the brave performance, the debutants and recoveries.
ON THE PERFORMANCE
"We didn't make it easy on ourselves to win, the effort was there...some errors there at the back-end really let the game get away from us," O'Brien said.
"We'll get smarter and I think we are intact in terms of the DNA we tried to create over the summer.
"The young blokes that came in, they certainly worked really hard and an example of that is probably at the end, two boys collided and they're going there to get the footy, they're not walking.
Match Highlights: Knights v Dolphins
"We'll get better at the other stuff, we'll execute the patches but there's something about this mob this year that makes me think they've got something about us [Club]. There's some tough and grittiness about them.
"Leading into this game we were coming off the back of a pretty gutsy win last week and we had the belief that we could do it today," Gagai said.
"We went out of half-time confident but like Adsy said there was a few little errors that cost us. First play there were just a few uncharacteristic things but they're easy things to fix. You can't fix effort and that's what the boys showed tonight.
ON HASTING'S HIA
"I believe he's okay, we just reviewed and he took part in some of that so he's up and about," O'Brien said.
"If you've got them down to 12, you want your halves out there but that's not the reason why we didn't get the job done. I thought when we got our noses in front then we had uncharacteristic things in defence, blokes stepping outside our system...I don't think we made it easy on ourselves to win the game, even when we're in front.
Knights halves in perfect sync
"I can't stand having that score line but I don't think it's reflection on the amount of work that they put in and how hard they tried. We need to be better in a lot of parts but we went in there and fought hard.
ON SAFITI'S INURY
"I don't know exactly, he'll have to go to scans but there wasn't much positive news when I walked in there. It doesn't look great.
"The 5-day turnaround came at a bad time for us, we've got a longer turnaround now so we can sit down and once the dust has settled we can try and plan about whether we can get someone in. We've got some spots there.
ON BRAILEY'S RETURN
"I'm confident he'll be back next week. I'm confident with Brails but I'm not confident in many others...I'll know more obviously on Monday.
ON THE DEBUTANTS
"I felt over the summer, not just tonight...they been apart of us the whole pre-season, they came on the camp and I think that's where they really earned some trust from their teammates.
"Each one of them individually but collectively there's something about them. Tommy [Tom Cant] came up with a pretty big play on Felise and Dylan was running around, he provided a heap of energy.
"Even young Riv [Ryan Rivett], he turned the footy over in the end, he wanted to be in and apart of that play to create something. We'll got a lot of good kids and we'll doing a lot of good things in Pathways.
