Warriors coach Brian McClennan is searching for answers over the fade-out that has put a big dent in his team’s NRL playoff hopes.

The Warriors raced away to an 18-0 lead against Newcastle in Auckland on Saturday night but were flat for the rest of the game and the Knights overran them to win 24-19.

A puzzled McClennan wondered if they were still feeling the effects of the energy-sapping 10-8 loss to Brisbane in rainy conditions eight days earlier.

He thought the Broncos’ subsequent loss to Gold Coast on Friday night might lend weight to that theory.

“We’ve had back-to-back away games and a big game against Brisbane last week and I see they were pretty flat last night, so was that a contributing factor? I’m not sure,” McClennan said.

“Why we flattened out, we’ll just have to investigate that further.”

The Warriors were rampant early on but the game changed after the benching of Feleti Mateo, who had laid on two tries through offloads, and props Ben Matulino and Russell Packer about 25 minutes into the game.

“I was looking at running the two props for a bit longer because we had a bit of possession, but we got some feedback from them that they were tired and needed to come off,” McClennan said.

“But the comeback also happened when we had less ball, let’s be fair here. In the first 15 minutes we had the majority of the possession.”

The Knights successfully targeted the Warriors out wide where the defensive inexperience of Omar Slaimankhel, a late replacement for Manu Vatuvei, and Konrad Hurrell was shown up.

Vatuvei’s hamstring injury is expected to recover in time for next week’s game in Perth against Manly.

The Warriors remain one place outside the top eight but could go two wins away from the eighth and final playoff spot if the Tigers beat the Cowboys on Monday.