“Kalyn as the Knights captain and best player, he’s not just leading it. He’s living it,” Andrew Johns says.
“That’s why Newcastle are going to win a premiership sometime soon. It’s because of him.”
Johns, on this day, an emotional Immortal and the last Knights captain to win an NRL premiership, is all jangled nerves, non-stop jiggling legs and newfound optimism, five days before one of the greatest wins in Newcastle’s history.
That was last Wednesday. On Sunday afternoon, Kalyn Ponga played with the same glint in his eye that Johns and the rest of rugby league have seen right throughout 2026.
But rarely before, and never so consistently from one of the game’s most gifted individuals.
Moses Leota, a premier front-rower of the past six years and outweighing Ponga by 15 kilograms, certainly never saw the Newcastle No.1 coming either when he was pancaked by the Knights skipper, with a critical late Panthers error following the very next play.
Nathan Cleary’s horrifically broken ankle hospitalised the game’s best player and hampered Penrith no end on Sunday.
But Newcastle were reduced to 12 players of course as well, rightly losing their clean-up man No.9 Phoenix Crossland to the hip-drop tackle that crunched both players out of the contest for the last 45 minutes.
Last year’s wooden spooners have the attack to keep pace with the Roosters in next Sunday’s decider. Yet another two tries originating from inside their own half made for 34 this year – easily the most in the competition – even if Dane Gagai’s forward pass to Dominic Young was missed.
Ball-in-hand, the Knights will be fine. Without it? Well they have Ponga’s newfound, never-seen-before resolve to fall in behind. Even if the skipper refused to indulge salivating reporters afterwards about the 76th minute goal line shot on Leota.
“No,” Ponga deadpanned, before insisting the Kiwi prop had slipped into contact.
His hit came four minutes before Newcastle’s astounding win left Johns first speechless, then in tears at his side qualifying for their first grand final in 25 long, largely miserable years.
But Ponga had ample company throughout an enthralling, drama-charged contest, one set alight the moment Penrith’s team sheet dropped with Cleary named to start from the bench.
Again, with an eye to what’s to come rather than what just came, barnstorming back-rower Francis Manuleleua was instrumental in Newcastle gaining the early ascendancy.
Again, what he did in attack was one thing – finishing off Bradman Best’s break down the Knight’s favourite left-edge when Blaize Talagi bit in on Ponga. But what he did without the ball was better.
Not many can stop Brian To’o in his tracks when he is tryline bound. Manuleleua didn’t just stop the human Kelvinator, he pummelled him.
And just as Angus Crichton told this masthead last week that the Roosters “expect a lot out of their edge back-rowers with how to defend and the support lines we run”, Manuleleua and Jermaine McEwen hold key roles in Newcastle’s attacking structure.
The coaching threads between Justin Holbrook, twice a member of Trent Robinson’s Roosters staff, will be raised more than once this grand final week.
Once again though, the thread that keeps both teams alive until the last week of the season and the first week of October is desperate, last-ditch defence.
Dane Gagai, 35 years young and playing in that exact fashion, produced a fine leaping goal line drop-out take when Newcastle sorely needed it against the Panthers.
Mat Croker dived on a loose ball that could’ve been anyone’s, but he decided it was going to be his.
McEwen made a similar call when Casey McLean burrowed for the line with nine minutes to play, defying gravity, physics and the NSW Origin centre in keeping him out of the in-goal and the grand final.
The Roosters’ own path to the decider has been littered with inspirational goal line defensive efforts. It’s how they knocked off Penrith in round 24 with the 12-6 victory that finally confirmed their status as true title contenders.
If Newcastle do pull off the seemingly impossible – swinging from spoon to silverware in just one season (a feat managed just once, by Western Suburbs in 1933-34) – it will be in the same fashion.
And as Andrew Johns says, in no small part, thanks to Kalyn Ponga.
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Dan Walsh is a sports reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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