‘He’s a pretty good healer’: Adam O’Brien backs Bradman Best to return from injury as Knights set to welcome back key forward

Knights coach Adam O’Brien says Bradman Best’s season isn’t over despite suggestions his strike centre would be out for the rest of 2024 after he suffered another hamstring injury in the loss to Brisbane.

Best missed a month of footy after he hurt his left hamstring in round 11, with the Newcastle speedster also in doubt for the State of Origin decider but ultimately overcoming a slight niggle to star for the Blues in the epic win in Brisbane.

He then backed up three days later against the Broncos and was forced off early with another hamstring injury, but his coach is confident he will be back this year with Newcastle just two points outside the top eight.

“The thing that we do have on our side is that he’s a pretty good healer,” O’Brien said.

“He’s always beaten the timeframe by a considerable amount.

“We’ll just have to wait and see where he gets to. He’s back in now after I gave him a few days off last week to get over the disappointment.

“His season isn’t gone just yet, so I wouldn’t rule him out of anything.”

Dylan Lucas is expected to replace Best at centre for the game against Penrith, while Adam Elliott is set to return from a calf issue that kept him out of the round 20 loss to Brisbane.

“I came off the Canberra game and I couldn’t play in that because I was too sick,” Elliott said, having recovered during last week’s bye.

“Leading into the Manly game, I twinged it (my calf). We were down on troops a little bit so I wanted to do my best to get to that game, but then I twinged it early in that game as well.

“We were down on troops, and playing in the middle, you need to be out there if you can. I felt like I could do my job well enough to stay out there, but in hindsight it probably made the calf a little bit worse.”

The Knights have a favourable run home, but it gets off to a brutal start with a trip to Penrith where they must find a way to stop Nathan Cleary, who scored three tries and set up plenty more in the thumping win over the Dragons on Sunday.

O’Brien conceded there’s no way to completely blunt Cleary’s influence on a game, but they’ll need to find a way to slow down the Panthers if they’re to beat them for the first time since 2018.

“He’s always going to have an impact because he’s too good of a player,” the Knights coach said.

“We need to go down there and prepare very well, and we have because in recent times we’ve always gone fairly well against Penrith because we’ve prepped well.

“It’s about doing your homework on Nathan and those around him. I don’t think you can totally eradicate his impact on the game, but you need to make sure that we defend really well as a unit.

“Doing things on your own doesn’t work well against Penrith.”