TOOHEY'S NEWS: Leading coaches claim the bulk of players in the Real NRL won't play for nothing to ensure the game returns this season

The NSWRL has tentatively set down a date of July 18 for domestic league competitions to potential kick-off if COVID-19 healthy and safety regulations at the time are met. But there are fears the Newcastle league competition may eventually be abandoned for the year if games have to be played with no crowds due to the costs involved in putting teams on the paddock.

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Both Lantry and Edwards, who coached sides to last season's grandfinal, virtually dismissed suggestions players would agree to amateur status and forfeit being paid this season just to ensure the competition goes ahead.

"I think society has changed, times have changed and as much as we all say we love the game, if you went to all the players that are contracted to play and earning some decent money and told them we needed them to play for free, I reckon you'd be lucky to find 20 percent who would be willing to do that," Maitland coach Lantry said.

"If mass gatherers of people rules aren't lifted until the end of the year, it won't be possible for us to have a competition because most clubs rely on bar, canteen and gate takings just to survive."

Edwards, who is in charge of the Cessnock Goannas, agreed admitting: "It's going to be hard not to have crowds when it all boils down to it.

"Financially, we are all going to take a hit and while there'll be some players who don't play for the money, there'll be plenty of others who do," Edwards said.

"It's 2020 and a lot of players these days are driven by the dollar. They are only in it for 10 years and they want to get as much money as they can so if they are not going to get anything out of it, I don't know if the game means that much to them that they'd play irrespective.

"I obviously can't talk for all of them but I'm pretty sure we'd lose a lot of players if it was zero money on offer. It would certainly sort them out, that's for sure."

Edwards also claimed it would be pointless doing all the planning to get the competition on if it is played over a severely reduced season.

"What I don't want is a mickey mouse competition that goes for seven rounds and then the semis - I'd rather see it knocked on the head than watered down to that extreme," he said.

"We need to be playing each other at least twice and if they want to go back to a top four, that's fine but we need something that's a bit fair dinkum."

Lantry said he can't understand why local league officials aren't investigating the possibility of playing later in the year when the chances of having crowds back may be greater.

"I'm perplexed as to why we are limited to an end of September-October finish," he said. "I can't see why we can't progress deep into the end of the year so we get a meaningful competition run and won."

He believes an August start with the grandfinal in late November is feasible.

"That puts pressure on clubs that have cricket pitches but there should be enough suburban venues around for us to find fields that aren't impacted by cricket," he said.

Injured Knights enforcer Mitch Barnett is ahead of schedule in his recovery from a serious neck injury that left him with no feeling in his arm following his side's second round win over Wests Tigers.

Barnett had surgery to relieve nerve pressure on his spinal cord earlier this month.

"Barney being Barney, he's probably ahead of where we thought he was going to be," Knights coach Adam O'Brien said.

"I'm really happy with where he is at. If anything, I'd like him to probably calm down a little bit. "The important thing is we got that fixed because it wasn't something we could have managed so it's fixed now."

Barnett is expected to be back playing in early July.

Former champion Knights centre Matt Gidley has lifted the lid on the origins of his famous flick pass that is now widely used throughout the NRL premiership.

Now constantly referred to as the 'Gidley flick', the Knights' Hall of Famer told the latest edition of Toohey's News: The Podcast that his trademark pass that was responsible for countless tries scored by Knights wingers Darren Albert and Timana Tahu during their careers was first developed almost accidentally while Gidley was playing beach footy.

"It was honestly never planned and I never actually practiced it," Gidley revealed in the Podcast. "Where it started, it might have been the 1998 pre-season and we started playing beach football in the pre-season months over the summer.

"You obviously couldn't use a lot of footwork in the soft sand so for the forwards, it was just sort of bash-and-offload stuff. It sort of started from that because, as I said, you couldn't beat too many people in the sand with actual footwork so you lost that advantage.

"It was pretty much making space and off-loading and it [the pass] became a bit of a habit. I carried it into the season and it became part of my game I guess for the rest of my career."

Gidley, who played 221 games for the Knights over 11 seasons and 17 Tests for Australia, is now a McDonalds franchise owner in Griffith in the Riverina.

Who are the Knights greatest rivals in the NRL?

It's a question worth pondering as we wait to find out what draw the NRL come up with for the rest of the season. The suggestion is there could be a number of rivalry rounds at the back end of the competition after everyone has played each other once.

Manly is an obvious one given the history of bad blood between the two sides while the Sydney Roosters would also get a nomination given the number of ex-Roosters players the Knights now have in the ranks plus a former assistant coach in Adam O'Brien.

Fellow steel city club St George Illawarra could be construed as another.

My nominations though would be the likes of the Gold Coast Titans, Warriors and the Bulldogs - the three favourites for the wooden spoon. Getting to play those three teams twice might be enough to finally end the club's finals drought.