Justin Holbrook has given his side no excuses after their “poor” loss to the Warriors — despite a lopsided penalty count that seriously hampered the Newcastle side.

With the score sitting at 18-6 to New Zealand at halftime, Holbrook was said to have told his team the contest was being over-officiated and that the Knights needed to adapt.

In the end, Newcastle were penalised 11 times compared to New Zealand’s four, while Andrew Webster’s outfit also dominated the territory battle with 60 per cent.

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Speaking in the post-match press conference, Holbrook was pressed on the penalty count but placed the blame back on his team while also conceding he wasn’t sure why it was more of an issue on Saturday.

“I’m not refereeing, that’s the way he sees it. That’s up to us to fix, we haven’t had an issue with it until today and we got it wrong and then paid the price for it,” he said.

“We know possession is going to be heavy against you if you play with poor discipline, and for some reason we had it today at home and I don’t know why.”

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The Knights also copped a pair of sin bins, with Fletcher Hunt being given his marching orders after a string of penalties saw referee Liam Kennedy give Newcastle a warning.

Hunt was the next to be pinged and spent 10 minutes sidelined, while Trey Mooney was also binned for dangerous contact while Tanah Boyd was taking a kick.

“Yeah, well both obviously different. So again, if you’re not controlling the game, which we weren’t, we’re on the back foot and we just didn’t handle it well,” Holbrook said.

Skipper Jacob Saifiti echoed his coach’s opinion and also labelled his team “ill-disciplined”.

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“Yeah, I thought we brought on ourselves. Obviously, like Justin said, with the ball we were pretty poor and put ourselves under pressure,” he said.

“Then in defence we’re just ill-disciplined. Yeah, we copped some six against and stuff but we have to look in the mirror and see what we did.

“We’ll do that this week in review and we’ll move on to next week.”