Roosters five-eighth Braith Anasta will undergo a scan on his broken nose on Tuesday to see the extent of the injury.

The broken nose, an injury from Good Friday’s game against the Brisbane Broncos, was realigned during the game with the scans to show whether it has been successfully put back into place.

If the scans prove that the break has been realigned it is hoped that Braith will be able to play in this Saturday’s game against the Melbourne Storm at the Sydney Football Stadium, kicking off at 5.30pm.

Manly prop Josh Perry is set to miss next Monday night’s NRL clash against the Vodafone Warriors.
He’s one of five players charged by the NRL match review committee.
Cronulla prop Ben Ross has been referred straight to the NRL judiciary on Wednesday night following his ugly hit on Melbourne halfback Cooper Cronk on Sunday. 
Karmichael Hunt also faces time on the sidelines after his Friday night shoulder charge which broke Braith Anasta’s nose. The Brisbane fullback was given a grade three careless high tackle charge and is looking at a one-week ban.
Storm prop Brett White faces a suspension of up to four weeks after punching Ross after the altercation between the Cronulla player and Cronk in the 66th minute of a heated clash at Olympic Park.
Cowboys centre Ashley Graham was hit with a grade four high tackle charge after another shoulder charge gone wrong, this time on Wests Tigers fullback Brett Hodgson.
And to round out a weekend of spite, Perry was charged with striking after appearing to headbutt Knights counterpart Danny Wicks last Saturday night.
He will miss one week whether he pleads guilty or is found guilty at the judiciary.

The St George Illawarra Dragons registered two crucial NRL points on Monday evening, easily defeating the Gold Coast Titans 30-12 in their round two fixture at WIN Stadium.

The win released some of the pressure on coach Nathan Brown who before kick-off revealed he would stay true to his halves combination of Jamie Soward and Rangi Chase irrespective of the team’s form.

The pair repaid the favour, heavily involved in four of the Dragons’ five tries with the supreme kicking game of Soward a shining light on a wet and cold night in Wollongong.

The 23-year-old half-back said Brown had worked with him during the week and was boosted by the confidence of his coach.

“It’s the best thing a coach can say to you, he said to me tonight ‘just go out there and play, you wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t play’,” Soward told Fox Sports.

“[Brown said] ‘just go out there and do the things you do best’ and I thought I was alright with my kicking tonight and I was happy with it.”

Dragons captain Mark Gasnier says the team was determined to win after its dismal round one performance against Wests Tigers.

“This week right from the outset the attitude was great,” he said.

“I think you saw a lot of back-slapping out there, the talk was great out there.

“Wins like that help the club and help the guys. We’re a young team and it should give them a lot of confidence I think.”

Titans coach John Cartwright says the Dragons made the most of their opportunities in the wet conditions.

“At half-time I really thought given even possession in the second half we could have went on with the game, but they got a big block of football early in the second half,” he said.

“They came up and they took advantage of the opportunities. We closed them down in the first half, the second half they came away with the points.”

Soward launched numerous air raids on the inexperienced Titans wingers with his towering left foot bombs, one of which gave the Dragons the lead immediately after half-time.

With the scores at 6-6, Jason Nightingale touched down when Jordan Atkins and full-back Preston Campbell misjudged a swirling Soward high ball only three minutes after the restart.

Chase then had a hand in St George’s next try three minutes later, when a deliberate grubber early in the tackle count picked out Mark Gasnier who stretched the lead to 12.

Making the red and white number six his own, Chase put the match out of the Gold Coast’s reach stepping his way through the Titans goal-line defence with 17 minutes remaining.

Soward capped off the match and his brilliant night with the boot, chipping precisely into the in-goal area for Matt Cooper to grab his second after he opened the scoring in the 11th minute with a display of strength and quick footwork close to the line.

The Titans never looked liked mounting a serious challenge despite drawing level 15 minutes before the break when a switch of play by half-back Scott Prince and some great hands by Anthony Laffranchi put hooker Nathan Friend over for his first NRL try.

A sly grubber by Prince on the hour mark saw Mark Minichiello grab a four-pointer with no full-back in sight, bringing the score to 24-12.

But poor handling in the difficult conditions and a slither of possession continually hampered any chances of a rare Titans road win.

Howdy y’all…

It has dawned on your resident fatman that running a blog while working full-time is an almighty challenge so I have decided to open my doors and call upon all aspiring fat-ettes to write about the game we all love - NRL.

If you’re interested in becoming a volunteer/contributor for the Fatchelor Pad send me an email or leave me a message. You can help make this the ultimate NRL reference blog.

Fat.

In more Bennett talk, Bulldogs coach Steve Folkes says he is not worried about speculation the club will pursue the Bronco’s foundation coach, who is believed to have the support of several of the Bulldogs’ new directors.Folkes says he is not surprised.

“My contract is obviously finishing at the end of this year as well so there’s always going to be that speculation. But I think if you let all that stuff worry you, I think you are going down hill,” he said.

While it is believed Folkes has been given only the first couple of months of the upcoming season to impress at the Bulldogs, he says his only concern is getting a team ready to play a trial game this weekend.

“The players and I are just so much looking forward to getting on to the football field and playing rather than worrying about all the innuendo and rumour that’s going around,” he said.

“That’s all we want to do. I’m a coach, I want to coach, the players want to play so we’d prefer just to be left to do that to be honest.”

How poetic. 

Fat.

A frozen moment in the unforgiving glare of a live television audience, and the door into Wally Lewis’s private hell creaked ajar in the most public fashion.

A powerful figure who once dominated his sport like no other, rugby league legend Lewis this week revealed his years of torment at the hands of an illness that buried him beneath a crushing depression.

Lewis has battled epilepsy for more than a quarter of a century, staving off its influence through his career highs and lows, now emerging out the other end of an ordeal that took him repeatedly to the brink, figuratively and literally.

As epileptic fits tormented the man known as the King, thoughts of suicide became a regular companion, to the point where Lewis even found himself poised on the water’s edge at his Queensland home during his recent recovery from major surgery.

“Suicide was something I thought of probably every two or three days,” Lewis told Woman’s Day this week. “I went to the jetty that runs off my backyard and I thought, ‘Do I just jump off? Do I put myself in a bag full of bricks? How do I do it …?’

“To be very honest, I didn’t know whether I had the mental capacity to start planning which way it was going to happen. I just kept thinking, ‘I can’t take this anymore’.”

The depression that drove Lewis to contemplate ending his life had returned in spades after last year’s operation aimed at relieving his condition led to the removal of a piece of his brain approximately 3cm x 5cm.

The courage to undergo the surgery alone was a significant step for Lewis, even before the long road back to being ‘almost normal’ now took its toll.

“I’d managed to keep my epilepsy under guard for about 25 years,” Lewis said.

”I just didn’t think there was any benefit in people knowing. I told my wife Jacqui, but I didn’t talk too much about the problems to our three kids. I didn’t want to worry them.

“But Jacqui made sure they knew, always telling them to keep an eye out for Dad, which they’ve done. The kids have been amazing. I don’t think it’s been fun for them at all these past couple of years. So much pressure and worry looking out for Dad, staying home with me when Jacqui wasn’t here to make sure I was OK.

“I must admit I was pretty much a coward about going through with the surgery. I kept dodging that option as I’d seen a colleague go through it and I was shocked by what I saw. I met him and he could barely speak and it terrified me. I knew it would be a long road back.”

But the on-air seizure where Lewis’s condition was laid bare proved a turning point in his willingness to treat the problem.

Previously Lewis had struggled on through the episodes, which appeared at age 19 and troubled him right through his footballing career, but when he froze in front of the Channel Nine cameras on November 30 in 2006 while reading the news his illness had started to take control.

“I got to the end of things here, I was dirty on the world, no-one could help me,” he told Woman’s Day. “The only thing I was thinking about was screwing up on air again. I used to arrive on the set of Channel Nine every night and I’d be absolutely petrified that something was going to happen on camera. When the seizures did occur I’d sink down and think, how much longer do I have to deal with this?

“When the on-air seizure happened, I told myself, ‘You’re better off dead than going through that again’. I felt like I’d let so many people down, in particular my family.”

After the surgery though, Lewis struggled to keep it together.

“The pain was unbearable,” he said. “I had pain-killers but I was very scared of becoming addicted, so I’d take half a tablet rather than a full one. And then one day I wanted to get something from the kitchen, but every time I’d walk in there I’d forget what I wanted. I went into the kitchen four times, and each time I just couldn’t remember. I freaked out and started to shake. I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and all I could see was this terrified man.

“My eldest boy Mitchell looked at me one day and said, ‘Are you all right Dad? What’s wrong?’ And I replied, ‘Nothing, nothing’s wrong’. But when I looked back into the mirror I saw that I was crying. I tried to stop but I couldn’t, and I kept shaking more and more.

“And Jacqui would be trying to tell me things that I couldn’t remember and I’d start crying again. It got to a point where I had more dark thoughts – ‘Am I going to keep doing this to my family? I’m crying all the time, they have to stay here and look after me and I’m too scared to go out. I’m falling everywhere’.”

“So I wondered if it would be easier just to go and top myself.”

But Lewis’s family supported him through his recovery and now the man many tout as the best ever rugby league player is almost back to his old self.

“The difference in Wally is like night and day,” his wife Jacqui told the magazine. “Thanks to the operation last February, he’s finally got control of his life again. He’s not having seizures, which were turning him into a recluse, making him hide within himself.

“He was forever worried when the next seizure was going to come. We basically lost Wally to the nightmare of the seizures for about 20 years.”

Wally may have been lost, but now the King is back.

– WWOS