Newcastle Knights and City United Ahead of NRL Grand Final

All week the scribes have been falling over themselves to come up with the best way to describe what the Knights mean to Newcastle ahead of Sunday's grand final against the Roosters.

The love between the team and the town is easy to valorise and even easier to fetishise as you lose yourself in coalfield cliches and well-worn stories about 1997.

The truth is it's something that's easier to feel than it is to describe. In a league of franchises, they are a club in the truest sense of the word because they are a vessel for the community, for its hopes, dreams and fears, for its joy, sorrow and pride.

They are the prism through which Newcastle feels it's feelings and at their best they become avatars of every quality the Hunter likes about itself — that they are hard-working and loyal to their mates, that they're courageous and daring, that they can walk as tall as anyone and fear nothing.

The Knights make it easier to cry, to dream of better times, to roar with triumph if they arrive and despair if they don't, to tell someone you love them or show them just how much.

The Knights are a way of life. The Knights are home. The Knights will make you believe the words of the club song, that this game is their game as surely as this town is their town.

The Knights are Newcastle and Newcastle is the Knights, and both mean more to the other than they could ever really say.

That meaning was in the tears that dried on the faces of current players, former legends and fans alike as Sandon Smith went on his run to paradise last Sunday.

Cody Hopwood, who will be the youngest prop to start a grand final since Josh Perry did for the Knights in their 2001 premiership at just 20 years of age, is 196cm and 105kg of Maitland iron with a grip like a pitbull's bite and a firm belief that the best way through any rugby league problem is to run directly through it.

Through this semi-final run he's forgotten what fear feels like, if he ever knew at all, and while he's a great chat for a young fella he doesn't even know what to call the thing that rose inside him upon realising Newcastle were through to the grand final.

"I was on the 30-metre line in tears. I just wanted to get down to him and give him a cuddle, even if I wasn't moving the fastest," Hopwood said of Smith.

"I just started crying, I don't know what came over me, all these emotions. I can't really describe the feeling."

The meaning is in the red and blue lights that have shot into the night sky all week from Newcastle City Hall in the middle of town and the paint that adorns houses throughout the region.

It's in the ink that fans are putting on their bodies, which the tattooists can't do fast enough.

It's in the red and blue sausages that aren't quite as hard to find as grand final tickets but are flying off the shelves as quickly as they come in.

A trip to five different butchers earlier this week in an effort to bring some back to Sydney as proof of the terminal case of grand final fever that had broken out ended fruitlessly.

Butchers are normally as good at chewing the fat as they are cutting the meat, but the demand had them harried. On Tuesday morning alone, one had sold 50kg in half an hour.

Selling out Hunter Stadium for a grand final watch party didn't take nearly that long — on Thursday, Knights fans snapped up all 22,500 tickets in four minutes.

That shouldn't be a surprise. Newcastle shows up for their Knights, shining armour or not. This is the team which once went a whole season with only one win to show for it but had its average attendance rise from the year before.

Aside from the COVID years, where crowds were restricted, the Knights have played 449 games in Newcastle since 1988 and only ten of them attracted fewer than 10,000 people.

That's through five wooden spoon seasons and, before this year, just four finals wins since that last premiership in 2001.

In darker days, the club took that support for granted. Their people loved them so much they didn't need their team to love them back.

But they never stopped coming, like they always knew it would work out right and they could start anew.

It's in those crowds that Tyson Frizell, once of the Illawarra but now an adopted son of another steel city, first felt it.

"I got a sense of it when I was out and about but it's not until we got everyone back at our home games that I understood how much of rugby league is in people's DNA," Frizell said.

"It's what they look forward to every week, it can make their week better or worse.

"It felt like home straight away. It's easy for it to feel like home because people are so welcoming.

"It's a country town on a big scale, people know who you are and are willing to do anything for you — they reach out, there's a community feel.

"There's great people everywhere, but there's nothing like Newcastle people."

If you don't have a ticket to the grand final or the watch party there's still other options.

If you want to go Hollywood style, Tower Cinemas will be showing the game on at least three big screens, like they did for the finals wins over New Zealand and Penrith.

Or, if you're after a wilder crowd, every pub in the area will be heaving, like they have been all week as they've filled with talk about last weekend's heroics and confident assertions that someone like Mat Croker is a dark horse for the Clive Churchill Medal.

The region is a fertile ground for public houses, bowls clubs and various other watering holes and it does them better than some places do cathedrals.

When Fletcher Sharpe, Cessnock's greatest export since the Johns brothers, gets asked what the home of the Goannas will be like on game day he just shakes his head.

"It'll go off, I can tell you that. The Leagues Club will be packed with people who couldn't get tickets to go down," Sharpe said.

"I know it'll be wild."

The sense of anticipation hangs in the air like smoke. "Up the Knights" has replaced hello, goodbye and thank you.

It is a conversation starter and ender, and it can fill the gaps in the middle. If you say it in Newcastle, even if it's to someone you've just met, it is proof you're not a stranger.

Plenty of Novocastrians who have gone far and wide are planning to head home for the weekend, just to be there if this becomes a dream from which they never have to awaken.

They have been waiting so long for this. Before last week, Dane Gagai was the only player in the NRL that had played in a preliminary final for Newcastle.

The last man standing from their most recent premiership was Timana Tahu and he's been retired for 12 years. Tony Butterfield, who started up front for them in 1997, is 60 years old and both Johns brothers are past 50.

Some fans were there during those old days and crave a win to make them feel young again as they don faded jerseys with long-vanished sponsors.

Some remember it from childhood and only now, a generation later and after going to hell and back, have a true appreciation for what it means.

But for plenty, this is their first time. They have heard all the old stories so many times, they have seen the photos of Joey on the skateboard or heard Matty exhorting that it was better than Lego or watched the tape of the ambush of Parramatta in 2001 until it replaced their own dim memories, until it was more real than their own lives.

This is their first chance to be part of it for true, to live a new version of legends they were raised on, to roll back the nostalgic fog and realise that history isn't always about the past.

To do so, they'll have to beat the Roosters and taking on a team like that is to defy an empire, even if Newcastle have found a way to weaponise attacking miracles.

The odds are against them but given they have been each of the past three weeks it feels like that doesn't matter.

The team will leave for Sydney on Saturday morning. The bus route has been detailed in the Newcastle Herald and on all the club's socials. There are no secrets left.

The people will line the road for miles, and they will wave their flags and lift their signs and go wild for one last look before their heroes try to bring back a little piece of heaven and for one last chance to prove they've loved them all along.

The Knights will leave for their date with destiny and on Sunday they'll meet their fate armed with everything their people have got, which is all they've ever really needed.

Their fans will dominate the day and they will chant that three-syllable symphony that fills stadiums and hearts as, far from home and at the edge of a dream a quarter-century in the making, team and town will prove once more that they are one.