Gold Coast Titans half Tyrone Roberts

The Gold Coast Titans have now won 2 straight after a win over the Newcastle Knights.

Most fans had the Titans billed as wooden spoon contenders and they put themselves in that position with four losses to start the season.

The battle at Cbus Super Stadium between the Newcastle Knights proved that they still have a lot in them despite the poor start and injury blows.

The first half started slowly, as the two teams fought in a tug-o-war of possession.

Acknowledging this, the Titans decided to turn a penalty into two points for their first of the afternoon.

Just 5 minutes later Philip Sami scored the first try, again turning a Knights error into points.

Watson dropped a stray pass from dummy half which the Titans jumped on to, quickly seeing they had an overlap on the left hand side that left Sami space to run alongside the sideline and score in the corner.

Two minutes later, in nearly the same exact style, Tyrone Roberts got his team a four pointer between the posts.

Daniel Saifiti put the ball down and Ash Taylor scooped it up for a quick pass off to his halves partner who broke through the Knights defense easily for the try.

With just over a minute to go in the half,the Titans weren’t ready to head to the sheds just yet as they found themselves in excellent field position.

Tyrone Roberts threw a beautiful pass to Brian Kelly who broke through a very weak defensive line from the Knights that would have definitely left many fans shaking their heads during half time.

The second half started off in no other way but the Titans scoring their third try off a Knights error.

Edrick Lee was unable to gather a Shaun Kenny-Dowall pass however, Dale Copley was able to.

The winger offloaded to a flying Anthony Don for his 71st try at the Gold Coast club.

In some promising signs for Knights fans, their team were looking for a comeback and were not going to admit defeat despite being down by 28.

The Knights scored three tries in 10 minutes proving how dangerous their attack truly can be.

Conner Watson gave an amazing assist, bringing in the defensive players to pass it off to Hymel Hunt for their first points.

Then, six minutes later, Pearce put a grubber into the in goal which Tyrone Roberts was unable to clear and Mitch Barnett turned into a try.

Kalyn Ponga then scored his first try of the season after breaking through the Titans defensive line and ran 30 metres to score.

With the scoreline looking much tighter and still just shy of 15 minutes on the clock, the Knights were looking at pulling off a spectacular comeback.

The Titans, however, had other plans in store as they looked to extend their winning margin and help their point differential some more.

With three minutes to go in the second half, Tyrone Roberts put in a grubber on the fifth tackle.

However, there was no one to chase it from his team and no one to clear it from the Knights, so he broke through to score himself.

A try off his own kick and what seemed to be the nail in the coffin for the Knights.

The boys from the Gold Coast weren’t done yet as they put together their best try of the evening with only ten seconds to go on the clock.

The halves combined moving the ball across field to Dale Copley who quickly passed back inside to a flying Michael Gordon.

The veteran fullback broke through a weak attempt at a tackle from Mitchell Pearce making the score 38-14 leaving Titans fans very happy and Knights fans very concerned.

The loss was only soured by a potential season-ending ACL injury to captain Ryan James.

Although the scoreline is not flattering for the Knights, coach Nathan Brown says there is not too much the side really needs to change.

“I don’t see why we’d want to change it, that combination,” said Brown.

“We were very threatening today.

“While the scoreboard suggested we were bad – and we were very bad in a part of the game – whenever we threw any sort of structural shape at them or the guys ran their plays, we caused them plenty of problems.”

NRL News Man of the Match

3. Tyrone Roberts

2. Phillip Sami

1. Michael Gordon

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.