The Beast rises like yeast, like the sun in the east.

Following the Warriors is often regarded as being a rollercoaster ride, they reach extraordinary highs and slump to depressing lows in the space of a week or two. Well it is a rollercoaster ride in that the Warriors simply can't be described as consistently good or bad, what fuels this rollercoaster narrative though are the silly mainstream media who can't help but get overly excited or dramatically negative when reporting on the Warriors.

The Warriors beat Newcastle, they put 40 points on the board.

A good win but let's make one thing vividly clear - Newcastle aren't very good.

Newcastle will be touched up much worse than what they suffered at the hands of the Warriors and that the Warriors didn't put more points on the Knights and conceded 18, reflects where the Warriors currently are.

The Warriors should have won this game and did. Besides the return of our Niche Cache deity Manu Vatuvei, there's nothing much else to this performance from the Warriors because it was about on par, perhaps worse than their previous outings this season. That's important as the Warriors haven't been overly bad this season, nor have they been overly good, another example of the Warriors still easing their way into the season, building combinations and sussing out their general patterns of play.

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I must repeat that while we'd all expect a professional sports team to be adequately prepared for round one, the Warriors simply don't have luxury that other teams like the Broncos, Cowboys, Tigers, Storm, Bulldogs, Dragons, Panthers etc have in that they have had players in key positions playing together for a long time.

Let's rewind and check how the Warriors performed in the previous rounds this season compared to the win over the Knights.

Metres: 1405m (vs Tigers) | 1200m (vs Broncos) | 1209m (vs Storm) | 1442m (vs Knights)
Broken Tackles: 28 | 14 | 27 | 37.
Missed Tackles: 40 | 28 |19 | 19.
Offloads: 5 | 4 |15 | 11.
Line Breaks: 5 |1 |3 |8.
Penalties Conceded: 8 |8 | 8 |8.
Errors: 10 | 5 | 10 | 13.

The Knights aren't going to win any awards for their defence so it's understandable that the Warriors enjoyed more metres, broken tackles and line breaks against the Knights compared to the first three rounds. What interests me is that my belief was that the Warriors had played better against Brisbane and Melbourne, which is kinda backed up by the stats, it's just that Brisbane and Melbourne are very good footy teams and that the Warriors weren't quite good enough to win those games. If the Warriors played at the same level against the Knights, they were always going to win.

It's hard not to like the trends on display in those stats though. The missed tackle count has dropped rather dramatically from the opening round which is encouraging, even if the Knights lack the plethora of weapons that other teams have.

Of equal importance is the rise in offloads, going from single digits to double digits which enables the Warriors to best use the likes of Shaun Johnson, Roger Tuivasa-Sheck and the power runners. The Warriors are a team who need at least 10 offloads every game as their attacking structures simply aren't as creative nor are they executed to a similar level as the NRL's best, so offloads enable them to play funky footy against scrambling defensive lines.

There's no need to get too high or too low on the Warriors, just as there's no need to get too high or too low on Shaun Johnson ... as everyone has done this season. The Knights weren't having a bar of trying to tackle Johnson and were woeful in that regard, nor was it much different to what Johnson has served up this season so far - while people were talking a bunch of shit about Johnson.

I still think that Johnson can run the footy a lot more and if Jeff Robson takes greater control, it will allow Johnson to roam and run the footy with more time and space. Johnson ran 7 times for 37m with 5 tackle busts against the Knights and in round one, Johnson ran 6 times for 78m with 5 tackle busts. Even last week against the Storm, Johnson ran 4 times for 29m which isn't too much different to what he did against the Knights.

The Warriors will be a lot better if Johnson's running 10 times for 60-80m though. Tuivasa-Sheck runs over 20 times and has four straight games of at least 200m, so imagine him and Johnson in tandem as Robson steers the ship. That's what I think the Warriors are working towards, have some patience.

I'm very excited about this Sunday's game against the Roosters as we're going to see a settled Warriors line up face a Roosters team who don't have many points, but are much better than Newcastle.

Meow, let's keep track of how many 40/20's the Warriors get this season. So far, they have 0 and Josh Hodgson for the Raiders has 2.