FIFTEEN points.
In a competition as evenly matched as the NRL, it's a significant margin. And for the Newcastle Knights that was pretty much the difference, on a per-game average, between the two halves of their 2019 season.
After their first 12 games, Newcastle were well placed, occupying fifth rung on the competition ladder.
A five-game losing streak between rounds two and six caused ripples of concern, but four of those losses were by eight points or less, so the Knights were at least putting up a decent fight.
The only blowout by this point, a 38-14 collapse on the Gold Coast, was soon forgotten as Nathan Brown's troops strung together six successive wins, beating the Roosters and South Sydney back-to-back along the way.
That meant that at the halfway point in their campaign, Newcastle's record was seven wins and five losses.
- READ MORE: Newcastle Knights news
The average scoreline in those games was 22.5 to 16.3 in their favour, and there was plenty of cause for optimism, given that the majority of Newcastle's remaining opponents were ranked below them on the points table.
But the second half of their season kicked off on an ominous note when they were overpowered 34-4 in Melbourne.
Newcastle bounced back with a 26-12 win against Brisbane, but then one loss became two, two became six, and suddenly they were playing catch-up in the race for the top eight.
A 42-6 win against North Queensland stopped the slide, but 48 hours later it was announced Brown would be leaving the club at season's end.
Then followed a 46-4 hammering from the Wests Tigers that rated as arguably the most insipid performance in Newcastle's history. They regrouped under interim coach Kristian Woolf to outgun last-placed Gold Coast 38-4, before ending their season with another abject surrender, 54-10 at Penrith.
Newcastle's record over the second half of the season was nine losses, three wins.
The only team to have won fewer games over the corresponding period were the Titans.
In the process, Newcastle scored 214 points and conceded 326 for an average scoreline of 17.8 to 27.1, in their opposition's favour. That meant they went from a plus-75 differential in the first half of the season to a minus-112 margin in their latter 12 games. That's a 187-point turnaround - or 15.5 points per game.
Missed tackles (381 to 409) increased from one half of the season to the next, but only by a couple each game, while Newcastle's error tally (110 to 124) was on average one worse per week over the last 12 rounds.
One game that stood out, statistically, was the round-three loss in Canberra. Newcastle missed 51 tackles, the most in any game all season, and made 13 errors, second only to the 17 they made against Melbourne.
Yet they lost only 17-10.
For whatever reason, the desperation they showed to stay in that contest waned as their season unravelled.
READ MORE:
