THE hysteria and confusion surrounding the Kalyn Ponga contractual soap opera cannot obfuscate a cold, hard fact - the Newcastle Knights will need to create history to reach the NRL finals this season.
After Sunday's 21-16 loss to St George Illawarra, the Knights sit 11th on the competition ladder, with two wins from six games.
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No Newcastle team has recovered from a two-and-four start to reach the play-offs.
And while the Knights are only two points adrift of the top eight and have three-quarters of their campaign still to play, their next three games are a daunting reminder of the odds already stacked against them.
On the next two Sundays, they host fourth-placed Parramatta and second-placed Melbourne respectively.
Then in round nine, they fly to Townsville to take on North Queensland Cowboys.
To put those challenges in perspective, Newcastle have lost four straight games against the Eels and 10 in a row against Melbourne.
And while they have a dominant record at home against the Cowboys, it is a different story in Townsville, from where they have returned empty-handed after eight of their past nine visits.
Their last win in Townsville was in 2015.
After the clash with the Cowboys, the draw appears more favourable with games against Canterbury (away), Brisbane (home) and the Warriors (away), before a round-13 bye.
But if the Knights are unable to take some points from any of their next three games, they could find themselves making up the numbers for the second half of the season.
"No doubt we need a result," Knights coach Adam O'Brien said on Sunday, after a fourth straight defeat.
"That's the obvious. But we have to fight our way out.
"We have to continually turn up every day with the attitude that we had this week.
"And our attitude hasn't been bad. We've been on the back of the four- or six-day turnarounds, so we haven't had a lot of time together. But we did this week and I felt like that came out [against the Dragons].
"Unfortunately you spend the week trying to improve your attack and we didn't defend well in parts.
"We need them to both marry up at training, get some consistency in our training week, and fight for a performance.
"We've got some quality opposition coming, and we need to fight hard."
O'Brien felt the Knights played "some entertaining footy, some effective footy" against the Dragons but paid a high price for momentary lapses.
"We got done on some micro-sleeps," he said. "Like, the team knows Andrew McCullough is going to test you on the tryline.
"We look at it all week. We talk about it. We know Macca. He's been a Knight.
"We have a micro-sleep at marker and we get done on it. We force a dropout and we're either too late or it's not important enough for us to get back into position, so we miss that one. We got done on some young, inexperienced things. And they are young guys, but we need them - for lack of a better term - to grow up really quickly, because we've got a big injury toll with some experience."
He was hopeful halfback Adam Clune would be fit to return against the Eels after missing Sunday's loss with a knee injury.
As for speculation that Knights officials had withdrawn a contract offer to Ponga, O'Brien dismissed that as "ridiculous".
"I can't keep up with you [media] guys," O'Brien said. "It has never been brought up to me once as the head coach.
"Our CEO [Phil Gardner] isn't even in the country, he's in Hawaii. I think they're still going through their process - both Kalyn's management and the Knights. Things are tracking along there."
