Newcastle coach Rick Stone admitted his side was still a 'work in progress' after failing to take their chances in their 20-14 loss to the Melbourne Storm on Saturday night.
Tries to Akuila Uate and Adam MacDougall helped the Knights to a 14-0 lead after just 21 minutes before the Storm wrestled back the momentum with tries to two former Knights in Luke MacDougall and Anthony Quinn to trail 14-12 at halftime.
Melbourne threatened to go on with it after the break but the Knights revved up their intensity in defence forcing the Storm to repeatedly cough up possession in their own half.
However, the Knights attack was unable to capitalise and Melbourne scored a try against the run of play 11 minutes from full-time to snatch a hard-fought win.
"I was really happy with the way the boys put themselves back in the contest," Stone said after the match.
"I think late in the first half the Storm was starting to rattle us a little bit – they played the ball with speed and we couldn't quite control them."
"Come 60 minutes when I was looking for our team to get back into the contest our effort was outstanding to put the pressure back on the Storm but Melbourne showed some championship qualities and our execution needed to be a bit sharper if we were going to score a try or get some points."
"Under pressure tonight we came up with some wrong options and the Storm showed they are a quality side. When they were put under pressure they handled it, absorbed it and then popped out the other side to score a long range try to really put a spear through us."
"It probably still is a work in progress for us and I think we will learn from this."
The Knights actually crossed the try line twice in the second half but both tries were disallowed. The first came near the hour mark when Newcastle lost the ball forward while in attack inside the Storm 20. Melbourne prop Adam Blair picked up the loose ball and ran diagonally upfield only to lose the ball in a heavy tackle.
Knights prop Evarn Tuimavave scooped up the ball and ran 15 metres to place the ball under the posts but he was called back as it was deemed Melbourne had not received any advantage from the re-gather.
A few minutes later Knights five-eighth Jarrod Mullen threw a long ball to Uate on the wing, who dived over in the corner. But the pass was called forward and the try was disallowed.
"Mullen's forward pass to Aku I thought came out of his hands backwards," Stone said.
"But I'd like to think 'what goes around comes around' and we will get a little bit of a share of that as the season goes on. The other one is a grey one. He definitely ran 10 metres, whether he ran 10 metres directly the other way I suppose was questionable."
"But we had enough chances to score and we just couldn't do it. We put ourselves back in the contest we had a couple of near misses and a couple of things didn't quite go our way."
"We should have a scored a try out of that glut of possession but we have to keep working hard and fine tuning what we are doing."
Despite the