Hunter's true believers have reason enough to celebrate Main goal: Newcastle coach Wayne Bennett. Photo: Darren Pateman The hottest rumour in rugby league a few weeks ago was that Wayne Bennett would leave the Knights to become the next coach at North Queensland - not Brisbane. It was an easy joining of the dots: he went very close to signing with the Cowboys and not the Knights in 2011, and his son-in-law, Ben Ikin, is on their board. Bennett has two seasons to run on a four-year deal with Newcastle, but his future has typically created conjecture all season. Put it down to the side he's been fashioning for the past 18 months and the fact they were no certainty to finish in the top eight. That they are one win away from a grand final illuminates, more than ever, the 63-year-old's ability to prepare his football team like they are the favourite for the Cox Plate - to the second, ready to win. Newcastle might not win it this year. In all likelihood, they won't get through or around or over the top of the Roosters' defensive line. Yet the mere sight of the Knights at Allianz Stadium this Saturday night is something to be celebrated. It's often been said that when South Sydney is strong, rugby league is strong. Interchange that with Newcastle. They are just as fundamental to its health. When former ARL boss Ken Arthurson released his autobiography in 1997, at the peak of the Super League war, he dedicated it to "the game that was rugby league." Then he wrote this: "Equally, I dedicate the book to the football fans of Newcastle whose unfailing strength and support and loyalty for the ARL cause gave me the strength to carry on during the bad times of seasons 1995-1996. In times of great uncertainty, they were the true believers. Devoted to the game for more than a hundred years, the Hunter has rarely stopped believing. A neck injury forced Andrew Johns into retirement in 2007, and when he emotionally addressed the crowd at the next home game, he told them his most vivid memory of playing before them had been two seasons earlier. "We came last that year," Johns told them. But you kept turning up and filling these stands to support us. Then the halfback started his lap of honour. They didn't chant his name. They chanted their city. Newcastle! In their eyes, nobody is bigger than the club - not even the game's greatest player - and that's why the injection of billionaire Nathan Tinkler has rankled so much with the true believers. Tinkler seized control of the financially crippled Knights on the promise of delivering a stable club for a deserving community. As a qualified sparkie from the Upper Hunter, he was one of them. Then he delivered Bennett, the most successful coach in history who had achieved the seemingly impossible - won the Dragons a title. The emergence of Hunter Sports Group was supposed to trigger a new dawn for a financially hamstrung club that had collected two premierships since its inception in 1988 not because of the depth of its pockets but the strength of the game, from Merewether to Muswellbrook. Instead, within a matter of months, there was a disconnect between a young billionaire with spiralling debts whose new club seemed like another expensive toy and a supporter base who considered the Knights to be their family. As his fortune was frittered away, and local companies and contractors chased their money when invoices weren't paid, many fans felt like they were losing their club. The fallout between the Knights and The Newcastle Herald (owned by Fairfax Media) was emblematic of the ugly distrust between club and community. Whether the last month of winning and the sniff of a grand final changes their mind on the Singapore-based Tinkler is unclear, but the true believers will take it anyway. There is so much to like after the Knights brutalised Melbourne. Beau Scott once explained to this journalist in disturbing detail how he hunts down wild pigs. It was a mental image not easily forgotten as he bent Storm players backwards. Jeremy Smith liked what he was seeing, and joined in on the torture. The Roosters cut Joseph "BJ" Leilua late last year because of his attitude. His attitude got right up the nose of some Storm players and put them off their game. Dane Gagai could play himself into a Kangaroos jumper with another performance like that. Kevin Naiqama seemed like just another signing for Penrith mid-year. Now it's a masterstroke. Having been displaced as the best hooker in the game by Cameron Smith six years ago, Danny Buderus deserved the last say. And then there's Bennett, who didn't come to the Roosters in 2006 in a move that broke chairman Nick Politis' heart, according to Phil Gould in these pages a fortnight ago. They've been dismissing his team all season for being too old, just as they often dismissed the Dragons because they had no attack. None of that matters to Bennett. Belief does. And as much as the thousands of players he's coached believe in him, it's not in the same postcode of how much he believes in himself.