It likely ruled them out of the Country Championships running, but Central North coach Tom Groth said there were "a lot of positives" to take away from their northern pool opening round loss to Newcastle.
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Taking on the defending champions at Tamworth's No.1 Oval on Friday, November 17, the home side took it to them, the five-wicket loss their best showing against the Novocastrians for a number of years.
It was certainly a huge turnaround from the thrashing they received from the perennial heavyweights in the corresponding game last season.
Then they could only manage 72, which Newcastle polished off inside 14 overs.
On Friday it took them almost 47 overs to chase down Central North's substantially more competitive 8-257.
"There were a lot of positives to come out of today," Groth said as they look ahead to North Coast on Saturday.
The batting was the big positive.
"We batted really well, to score almost 260 it was a pretty good effort," he said.
"There were a few blokes that contributed and a few blokes had a good go at the end and got us up to a pretty good score."
Hoping for at least 250, he said they just "wanted to be positive and get off to a pretty solid start".
"We know here the white ball when it's nice and hard, we get pretty good value for runs," he said.
Unfortunately things didn't quite go to plan with Steve Abel, Simon Norvill and Jye Paterson all falling cheaply to leave them 3-39.
But, one of the traits of this year's side is their batting depth, with the likes of City United pair Tom Fitzgerald and Callum Henry, who don't usually bat below six, coming in at eight and nine.
We wanted to be positive and get off to a pretty solid start
- Central North coach Tom Groth
Knowing that they "batted pretty deep" Groth said they "weren't too worried" about the early wickets, it was just a matter of consolidating, which captain Josh Trappel (39 off 77), Brendan Rixon (27 off 48) and Adam McGuirk (29 off 44) did.
Shannon Threflo (20 off 18), Fitzgerald (41 off 33), Henry (21no off 28) and Sam Dalibozek (41no off 18) then upped the ante to lift them beyond 250.
In a similar story to their opening Regional Bash game against Greater Illawarra on Thursday, they though didn't bowl well early and Newcastle openers Daniel Arms (42) and Aaron Wivell (50) took full advantage to have them always pretty well ahead of the game.
They had them tracking at about six and over for the first five and when Abel finally struck in the 15th over, they were already a third of the way to the runs.
The home side managed to stem the flow after that but weren't able to pull them back enough as Adrian Asherwood blasted an unbeaten 64 off 37 to get the reigning four-time champions home.
"We just didn't bowl as well as we would have liked at the start," Groth said.
"They came out and went pretty hard and we probably just got our lengths wrong in the first probably eight-12 overs.
"And we were just a bit slow reacting to that. We weren't kind of learning from our mistakes.
"But once we got the spinners on we pulled it back.
"Jye (Paterson) and Steve (Abel) did really well and probably got us back in the game."
Paterson finished with 1-34 from his 10 and Abel 1-26.
In the other game Ethan Debono scored a brilliant 150 and Bailey Abela 97 to guide Greater Illawarra to an eight wicket win over North Coastal.
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