Eager to get the Kiwis onto the front foot, Jesbass takes the first hitup of the 2011 Four Nations...
***
By The Bye
The National Rugby League has reportedly gone into lockdown in recent weeks after allegations of unfair bias against the competitions worst performing team.
Notorious for their anonymity as part of a long standing "better not seen or heard" club policy, representatives for The Bye have threatened to walk out on the competition in the face of what club stalwarts have labelled "farcical scheduling", with one insider going so far as to call it "a deliberate campaign dedicated to ruining the sporting spectacle that is The Bye".
A team with a chequered history, The Bye first joined the inaugural New South Wales Rugby League season in 1908, but their introduction to the competition wasnt without controversy.
Having missed the first round of the season, The Bye entered the tournament alongside Cumberland the following week, and if club sources are to be believed they were disadvantaged from the beginning.
"In our first round, we were pitted against Cumberland, Newcastle, and Easts," claimed one insider, citing early club records. "The next week, they made us play seven opponents over a single round! I think other sides just saw us as an easy way to get two competition points."
After that, The Bye only had a single opponent per round, but the damage had been done, and the disillusioned club left the competition for more than a decade.
Their return came in the shortened 1920 season, and The Bye, although unable to secure a win, was present until the end of 1929.
A short stint from 1935 to 1937 followed, but The Bye wasnt to be seen again in Australias top domestic competition for almost half a century.
"We spent a lot of that time working on playing pathways for our juniors and amending our charter," another anonymous source suggested.
Their predicted mid-1980s resurgence didnt last long, and they were gone by the beginning of the 1988 season.
By the late 1990s, The Bye had chosen a different tact. Insistent that they would be more competitive given favourable scheduling, The Bye decided to make their presence known.
In scenes foreshadowing the actions of South Sydney a few years later, supporters of The Bye invisibly took to the streets in protest, pressuring the newly formed National Rugby League to allow them to return to top flight football.
As one supporter notes, The Bye returned in 1999, despite having no official home ground: "We agreed to forgo home advantage to sweeten the deal."
However, after more than a dozen seasons of embarrassing results, The Byes future is once again at risk.
"The Bye experiment has been tried and it has failed," declared a faceless NRL official. "That team is an embarrassment to the competition as a whole."
But club stalwarts are threatening to jump rather than be pushed.
"Were going to call their bluff," stated one club official. "Theyve handed us some pretty farcical scheduling. To suggest that were an embarrassment is utter tripe. This year, they wouldnt let us play until Round 9, and then they expected us to make up for the previous two months by facing 8 opponents!"
Indeed, NRL scheduling had the Bulldogs, Eels, Knights, Panthers, Roosters, Rabbitohs, Sharks and Tigers all facing The Bye on the same weekend. Some of these matches clashed, resulting in The Bye forfeiting competition points to opponents whose grounds they couldnt reach in time to take the field.
A fortnight later, they faced and failed to defeat half a dozen teams.
"Its a shambles," the official continued. "We gave up home advantage as a favour and this is how theyve repaid us."
With a history that stretches back more than a century, The Bye would surely go down as the team with the worst competitive record in sporting history, but the claims of unfairness will forever plunge their track record into murky water.
The closest theyve managed to claiming competition points is having the Melbourne Storm losing theirs after severely breaching the salary cap.
"We're just exhausted with fighting such a petty system, and we need a break," added one insider.  "We could really do with a week off."
***
687 words between the stars.