PORT City Breakers will have almost 10 regular first graders watching from the sideline when they look to stop a four-game winless slide on Sunday.
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Ethan Hyde, Mitch Fowler, Bailey Connor, Sean Barrett, Dylan Hemsley, Elia Glassie and Clint Walker will all miss the clash with last-placed Taree City.
They lost hooker Jeremy Smith and back-rower Andrew Fox before a ball was kicked in round one, but coach Dan Kemp refused to use their injury crisis as an excuse for their disappointing season.
"We almost have more people on the sideline than we do playing, but that's the game we play," he said.
"We went two years with hardly any injuries and now we've got them all at once; it's quite laughable really."
While the unavailability of players had contributed to their results in recent weeks, Kemp said his team arguably deserved to lose.
"We've been putting band-aids on things just to get to Saturday and we haven't been able to work as hard as we'd like," he said.
Despite that, the competition remains wide open.
Macleay Valley and Wingham occupy the top two rungs on the ladder and are the teams to beat.
But the Breakers will take confidence out of their four and 12-point losses to those two sides in the last three weeks.
They had Adrian Daley and Dan Dumas sent off during the Wingham clash and an intercept ultimately proved the difference in their 32-28 defeat at Kempsey last weekend.
"I don't feel like anyone's flying at the moment," Kemp said.
"We've still got a side good enough to win it so we'll try to win these last two matches and go into the finals with a little bit of wind in our sails."
First grade will kick off at 2.30pm on Sunday at Regional Stadium pending the decision from the Bulls on whether they will field a reserve grade side.
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