The Mad Butcher talks in exclamation marks, bold text and bullet points — his words a mix of hyperbole, wild optimism and general workaday madness. He’s in fine form this afternoon, with a couple of conversations on the go at any time and a third (or fourth) standing by on his phones.

“Tena koutou! Tena koutou! Tena koutou! A Maori ora, e Maori ora… Kia ora… Gidday mate! Wel-kim to the Mad Butcher’s Club! Wel-kim to the Stacey Jones Lounge! Wel- kim to the Fortress — Mt Smart Stadium! Home of the Mi-tee — I repeat the Mi-tee — Vodafone Warriors!”

It’s Easter Sunday and the Warriors’ first home game of the season. After finishing fourth in 2007 — and making the NRL’s semifinals for only the fourth time in 13 underachieving years — this might be the Warriors’ year, the fans are saying. But one game in (a convincing loss to reigning premiers Melbourne) and heads are down, hearts sinking. The team’s best back, Wade McKinnon, has done his knee and is gone for the season. And captain Steve Price, rated the best prop in the competition, tore his hamstring against Melbourne and will be out for weeks.

It’s not looking good. “How long’s Price gone for?” I ask Peter Charles Leitch, QSM. “You’ll have to ask the doctor,” he cries. “I’m the Butcher, not the doctor!”

Which is only partly true. Although he’s never played a game in his life, Leitch is a rugby league evangelist — the New Zealand Rugby League’s anointed ambassador. Leitch, dyslexic youngest child of a fitter and turner, performs the same role for the Warriors. And as punters enter the Stacey Jones Lounge, right at the top of the Western Stand, he’s there to pump them up, mock boxing, fists shining with rappers’ bling, including a Warriors’ signet issued only to him and 238-game veteran Stacey Jones.

“I’m tryin’ to get a little club goin’,” he says. “We’ve got 150 members. Some party animals, let me tell ya. Great people. Salt of the earth, mate. These are the workers here. None of that fuckin’ society bullshit.

“Look, I say fuck a lot. Doesn’t suit everyone. But there’s a lot of people that fuckin’ love it — they love it! It’s our family, brother. It’s our family!”

Kick off. The crowd, 15,000 strong, roar like loons. Cook Island drummers hammer away. And when captain Ruben Wiki crunches his opposite, the lounge explodes. Leitch, presiding from his ambassadorial barstool, is especially effusive: “Hit ’em. Hit ’em hard, boys. Crush the bastards!”

There are no more fanatical fans in the country than these. Even during the Warriors’ darkest days when they scrapped it out with Souths for last, this loyal band would turn up week after week.

Fans like Tony Herewini, former Otara fullback, who worked his way up from welder to head honcho at TP Engineering, a Manurewa company that employs 25 men. Never missed a home game. And Trevor Bell, 61, an Air New Zealand cargo handler, who played two games at fullback for Auckland way back; he’s been here from day one: “March 10, 1995. The game against the Broncos. We were gonna win... until Alfie Langer scored his try, the little bugger.”

Bell, who admits missing a game once, is having a heart op in a couple of weeks. “Double bypass. But I’ve booked it for when we have two away games. Won’t miss a minute, mate!”

Twenty-five minutes in. Manu Vatuvei gets the ball. Fifteen metres out, half a metre from the sideline – two Parramatta defenders in front – the 109kg butterfingered monster skittles them and skips down the chalk. When the video ref confirms an impossible try, the Butcher goes ballistic.

“And they roar at the Coliseum. They roar at the Coliseum!” Looking across at a nearby nonplussed plumber, he shouts, “Mate you’re allowed to show some fuckin’ emotion… Jesus!”

And now he takes me back. 2005. The final of league’s Tri-Nations. Coach Brian McClennan had taken the Kiwis to Mt Nebo near Brisbane. With Mad Butcher as manager, the Kiwis were a family – Brothers in Arms, they called themselves. Capable of anything.

“Mate, to beat Australia. To be the manager. Dream come true, mate. Dream come true. We dropped a bomb on the world of rugby league. 24-0, mate. [Australian coach] Wayne Bennett resigned!

“Then in 2006 it was down to the wire. A scrap. A war. A battle royal! We lost. 16-12. Extra time. But at the end people came up to me and said, ‘Butch, you might have lost, but you done it with fuckin’ pride and passion.’ Mate, for once in my life it felt okay to lose.

“There was honour in that defeat. But then to go down 58-nil and all that bullshit... it was a debacle. All that good work — undone. It killed me, mate.”

The past 18 months rank among New Zealand Rugby League’s worst. Since Sel Bennett’s forced resignation in November 2006 (over the chairman’s dogged insistence that Australian-born hooker Nathan Fien’s great-grandmother was in fact his grandmother, thus making him eligible for the Kiwis) the NZRL has chewed through three chairmen, three coaches and the best part of two boards. In 2007, their centenary year, the Kiwis racked up record losses to Australia and England and the NZRL reported its own record loss: $1.7 million.

And in January leaguies watched, wanting to turn away, as man-of-steel Tea Ropati was tried on rape and sodomy charges. It couldn’t get any worse. Or could it?

Characteristically, Leitch is looking for positives. “The reality is the Vodafone Warriors are rugby league in this country. After the [NZRL] catastrophe, the Warriors are the future. And we’ve got a very good system here. We’re lucky we’re owned by a couple of millionaires [Eric Watson and Mark Hotchin]. We’ve got Wayne Scurrah running the club with John Hart. Good men. Smart men. Care about the fans. And that’s important. You need the corporate sponsors — the Vodafones, Pumas, Lion Reds — but you also need the fans.”

And with that the game’s most fervent supporter is off. He works the room, clapping blokes’ backs, telling them what lovely daughters their wives are, ruffling the hair of their sons. He fields more phone calls and then — when the siren sounds at the game’s end — hobbles up on a makeshift stage to Kool and the Gang’s ‘Celebration’.

“What a great win today to the mighty Vo-da-fone Warriors,” he bellows. “36–16. I propose we drink a toast to the mighty Vo-da-fone Warriors. Our boys. Our team!”

Leitch skulls a bottle of Lion Red, then another. Raffles are won, new similes coined (“Mate, you’re as gay as a chocolate frog”), spot prizes drawn (“Would you like the Radio Hauraki hat or Lion Red ukulele?”), Mrs Mad Butcher (wife Janice) serenaded.

Four Warriors, including 16-season warhorse Ruben Wiki, come upstairs to join the party. Leitch toasts the Warriors a fifth time, skulling his fifth beer, before the show climaxes to Jimmy Barnes’ ‘Working Class Man’.

Wiki pulls up a chair to chat with the fans — and I notice how tired Leitch looks. His sister died a week earlier; a brother’s battling bowel cancer in Wellington. And Leitch, himself, is struggling with a crook hip and dicky heart: he’s recently had a stent inserted, bypassing an artery he says was 95 per cent blocked. He needs a rest but the game won’t let him. And you wonder what future there is for a game that depends so heavily on the fortunes of one team — the famously flaky Warriors — resting on the tired 63-year-old shoulders of this man.

“Not goin’ to die, mate,” he says. “I’m the Mad Butcher. I’m immortalised!”

Watch a game of league and you find yourself flinching at the collisions — fearsome hits, often three on one — that mark this as the toughest of the contact sports.

It’s simpler than rugby union — some say dumber — with a 36-page rulebook compared to union’s 116. League has no rucks, mauls, lineouts, and its scrums are irrelevant. Compared to rugby’s Byzantine breakdown laws, league’s blissfully straightforward: if you’re tackled, the tacklers get off and you stand up and play the ball back with your foot. With just 13 players a side, league’s appreciably faster, though talkback grumps say rugby’s new laws are taking it ever closer to the dark side — it’s only a matter of time, they harrumph, before rugby players are all 1.9m 100kg league robots.

And unlike rugby, league’s superstars are players like Langer, Jones and Benji Marshall — brave, fast, diminutive men no bigger than the average Joe. Leaguies say that their game would kill rugby if it was given a half-decent break.

However, league historian Bernie Wood will tell you the Establishment were never going to let this happen. How many people, he asks, know about Albert Henry Baskerville?

In 1977, Wood “rediscovered” Baskerville’s gorse-veiled grave in Wellington’s Karori Cemetery. “Here was the pioneer — the man who started the game in New Zealand, introduced the game to Australia… who started international football.”

It’s quite a story. 1907. Baskerville, just 25, reads a newspaper report of a British league match. Twelve years earlier, the Northern Union — 21 clubs from Lancashire and Yorkshire — had broken away from the imperious Rugby Football Union (ostensibly over compensating players for time lost from work, but really this was a struggle between the proletarian North and born-to-rule South).

Motivated more by lucre than solidarity, he gets a team together including eight All Blacks, four of them Originals, and sets sail for the Mother Country. Dubbed the All Golds, the team play 49 games over nine months, notching series wins against Great Britain and Australia. The players get £350 each, enough to buy a small house — and a lifetime ban from the New Zealand Rugby Union.

Poor Baskerville died of pneumonia in Brisbane before the team’s last game — and you can’t help thinking that league’s best shot at national domination died with him. The game’s been an outsider even since, flourishing only in blue-collar bastions.

Like Greymouth, where Bernie Wood, son of a coalminer and third in a family of 10, grew up. “There were a stack of Kiwis around. Mick O’Brien, a 1928 Kiwi, lived at the top of our street. Coalminer… saw him every day of my life. And Charlie McBride lived across the road; he was a Kiwi from 1946 until 1953… regarded in his time as the most devastating tackler in world rugby league. He worked in a menswear shop. Still alive today — our oldest living Kiwi. Still living in Greymouth.

“What put the Coast on the map as a rugby league stronghold was the visit of the 1946 British team. They came over in an aircraft carrier called the Indomitable, so they were called The Indomitables. They were a brilliant team… beat Australia. Then they came down to the West Coast. Cold, miserable day. Rain pouring down. And we beat them 17–8. Every Kiwi team thereafter had Coasters in the team. Great players — blokes like George Menzies (29 tests), Frank Mulcare (18 tests), Bill McLennan (28 tests) and (Jock) Butterfield who played 99 games for the Kiwis including 36 tests.”

While Hokitika and Westport stayed loyal to union, league ruled the rest of the Coast. Greymouth even hosted a test match in 1954 against Great Britain.

“The Kiwis were the strongest side in the world then,” recalls Wood, who played in the curtainraiser, aged 14. “We’d beat Great Britain in 1950, France the next year, Australia in ’52 [including a 49–25 thumping] and then again the following year.

“There was a crowd of 4000 there — half the population of Greymouth. It was a fantastic British team but we won [20–14].”

For 30 glorious years, the Coast was a rugby league redoubt, second only to Auckland. “Now they play second division league — they don’t play Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury. The numbers are down. The tough miners have gone; the sawmillers have all gone. The hard men working on the land aren’t around.”

League has never had the numbers. While a Warriors-fuelled spurt in the late 1990s saw player registrations rise to maybe 35,000, now there are around 15,000. Netball (125,000), soccer (105,000), rugby (136,000) and even hockey (43,000) are streets ahead.

Like many small, battling organisations league’s been riven with internecine squabbling. So when the NZRL unravelled so abjectly (see the end of this story for details) the backlash was vociferous.

In a sport with more than its share of larger-than-life personalities — think Leitch, Lowe, Lonergan — it’s surprising that the NZRL has turned to a quiet man for its salvation. I meet new chairman Ray Haffenden a week after the NZRL’s AGM on March 29. With some reluctance he confirms gaming trust grants, which typically provide half the NZRL’s revenue, have slumped (from $4.2 million in 2003 to $1.8 million in 2007), that the contribution from Sparc (Sport and Recreation NZ) has been cut and Lion Red’s sponsorship slashed.

But Haffenden, 63, doesn’t really want to talk about this. “There was a mood at the AGM that there’d been enough blood-letting. We’ve gone past that. Time to look ahead.”

Haffenden’s a “leaguie from way back”: he played fullback for Linwood, Canterbury and the South Island; coached Canterbury, the South Island and the Junior Kiwis and managed the Kiwis proper in 1991, ’94 and ’95. Even so, why on Earth did he want the job?

“I wouldn’t say I raced across the room for it. But someone had to do it. I wasn’t going to back down from the challenge, particularly because of what we’d been through prior. I wouldn’t turn my back on the game — no way.”

He cares deeply about the game — but so have his predecessors. Indeed, a repeated criticism of New Zealand league administrators is that though they’re invariably good, uncomplicated men, they lack the vision, business acumen and rat cunning of the Aussies (who, so the narrative runs, push us round like kid brothers). Indeed, the NZRL’s own governance review, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, concluded: “The day for well-intentioned amateurs is on the decline. Sports administration is a skill in itself.”

Which is possibly why Haffenden, a former regional manager of Allied Liquor in Auckland, is so keen to stress his corporate credentials. He talks of governance, but there is a certain sadness in seeing the workers’ game — so honest, so earthy — succumbing to the vapid language of managerialism. Leveraging this, synthesising that — all in the name of best practice, ticking boxes, recognising stakeholders. Going forward.

Haffenden’s unapologetic: “The world’s changed through governance. That’s what everyone has to conform to, whether you agree with it or not. The funders demand it.

NZRL’s accounts make eyewatering reading. The governance reviews cost $150,000; governance costs overall rose from $180,000 in 2006 to $401,000 in 2007. The NZRL spent $320,000 on consultants; total expenditure on ‘professional services’ rose from $146,000 (2006) to $538,000 (2007).

Chairman Ray Haffenden: “I’ve got governance books here that the Australians gave us. Colin Love and David Gallop mailed them to me.” Did he find that condescending? “No, not when they’re going to help us out.”

“I’ve got governance books here that the Australians gave us. (Australian league heads) Colin Love and David Gallop mailed them to me.” Did he find that condescending? “No, not when they’re going to help us out.”

With the NZRL sliding, the emphasis on responsible management is sensible. But the 2007 accounts reveal the organisation’s $1.7 million loss was not due only to a fall in revenue (from lower-than-expected gate receipts and less pokie money). A larger management party to the UK cost the league $250,000 more than budgeted. The various governance reviews cost $150,000; governance costs overall rose from $180,000 in 2006 to $401,000 in 2007. The NZRL spent $320,000 on consultants; total expenditure on ‘professional services’ rose from $146,000 (2006) to $538,000 (2007).

Haffenden says the NZRL needs a game plan. But when he talks of how the Kiwis are the flagship, the NZRL’s only source of income, and then a future test programme of perhaps two games a year (“You’ve got to fit in with the English and Australians”), you wonder if he has the vision.

“The game needs someone who can rattle the cage,” the Mad Butcher had told me earlier. “Ray Haffenden’s a wonderful person, but I don’t know if he’s hard enough to make the hard calls.”

“Hard enough?” Haffenden muses. “Back me up against the wall and see what you think then.

“Look, there’s three types of coaches. There’s the coach who wants to listen to himself talk, the coach who wants to beat people up — and the coach who talks quietly to his players and gets results that way. I prefer to think that’s how I am.”

Bernie Wood, a former NZRL deputy chairman, has no doubts. “I’m absolutely thrilled Ray’s the chairman. That’s the end of the board squabbles. That’s the end of people with their own agendas. He’s very presentable and he’s totally honest.”

And evidently willing to limit his power. At the recommendation of general manager Peter Cordtz, the NZRL’s going to employ a CEO. “We’re after a financial and commercial heavy-hitter,” Haffenden says.

He’s sanguine about league’s future. He talks frankly of struggle ahead, now that rugby has gone professional (and thus swiped league’s original raison d’être). But he points out rugby’s struggling to hold its ground, fans sick of Super 14 groundhog days, players cantering off to the UK. That’s where the money is. The balance of power is inexorably shifting — famous league clubs like Wigan have even contemplated switching codes.

“I believe one day there’ll be a hybrid game of both.” What? Heresy from the chairman! “It nearly happened under Superleague. You can’t halt progress.”

In the space of 21 magical days in 1977, the Auckland league team beat Australia, England and France. Auckland’s always been the game’s powerhouse; it has half the country’s registered players — 3350 juniors; 2240 seniors; 140 women.

Auckland Rugby League’s ebullient football operations manager Gordon Gibbons, 51, remembers the good old days. “I played for Manukau from when I was six till I was 40. I remember playing against Richmond in front of 8000 people. That’s in the late ’70s — certainly not a million years ago.

“In 1983, we [Manukau] played St Helens at Carlaw Park. Beat them. We had Dean Bell and Clayton Friend playing. Going back to the club afterwards… they had to use the #1 field as a car park, cos the car park was chocker.”

But when Gibbons took the ARL job in 2006 after 12 years as Lion Breweries’ national sponsorship manager, the club game was in trouble.

Societal changes that have affected all organised sports — weekend trading, drink driving laws, a fall in volunteerism, a plethora of available leisure options — were hurting league. Gentrification had killed off some grand old city clubs; Grafton and Devonport have folded, City and Newton merged but now only field one team. The strength of the game is out south now, the biggest clubs are Manurewa (45 teams), Mangere East (29) and Otahuhu (27).

“We had a vision about trying to regenerate the times of old,” Gibbons says. “Reigniting the pride in the clubs. With the end of the Bartercard Cup — which included five regional Auckland teams — the best players have returned to the Auckland competition, three divisions of eight teams each. The premier comp, the Fox Memorial, now comes with $15,000 prize money for the winner. And the ARL has reintroduced the Roope Rooster, a Ranfurly Shield-type comp — with cash and chooks (Tegel donates 12 a game) for the victors.”

And $100 Mad Butcher meat vouchers.

Auckland Rugby League’s Gordon Gibbons: “How would I describe a leaguie? A loud passionate person who is blue-collar, has four kids and a mortgage.”

“Peter is somebody we’ll never have another one of,” Gibbons enthuses. “In times of real disharmony within the game of league, Peter Leitch has been the one shining light that’s kept us afloat. He’s reminded everybody that it’s a working man’s game. That rugby league is a huge part of a lot of people’s lives.”

That leaguies have to stick together. The game’s three significant organisations — the NZRL, ARL and Warriors — are all based in Penrose, the NZRL and ARL inside the same building. Yet there have been times when they wouldn’t talk to one another.

Making this situation sillier is the fact most administrators wear several hats: Gibbons, for instance, is the Kiwis’ new manager and runs a 500-strong corporate lounge up at the Warriors.

“We ride on the coat-tails of this lot,” he says, gesturing out his office window at Mt Smart Stadium. “When they’re playing well and administered well… all of a sudden kids want to play league.

“Our relationship with the Warriors is fabulous now. I walk up there every day, sometimes just for a cuppa. It’s such a warm and welcoming place now. Hasn’t always been. It’s a 300-metre walk, mate, but there were times it seemed 300 miles with a huge wall in between with barbed wire and an electric fence!

“Don’t forget your grassroots… it’s a cliché people use all the time. But now these guys are meaning it — they appreciate the clubs are where their fans are.”

How would he describe a leaguie? “A loud passionate person who is blue-collar, has four kids and a mortgage. That’s 80 per cent of the Warriors’ fan base.

“I love having a beer with those Joe Public fans. The passion they ooze. Everything else is forgotten — the mortgage, the job … they come along to the game and it’s just another world for them.”

League in Auckland’s on the up, Gibbons continues. They’re getting up to 1500 people at club games; the ARL has a team — the Vulcans — in the NSW Cup, the NRL feeder comp; and it’s at last getting traction in the schools. The sale of Carlaw Park has left its finances in robust shape: the ARL is looking to buy land for another park, a home ground with seating for 5000. A new start.

Which is what needs to happens in the NZRL’s office across the hall. “Ray [Haffenden] is absolutely on the right track,” Gibbons continues. “He has to tear up whatever was in front of him and start with a clean piece of paper and say, ‘Where did we go wrong?’ Okay, our governance was wrong — need to fix that. But let’s not go overboard. Do we need more corporate input? Absolutely. But don’t turn your back on the people who’ve given so much to the game — your Sel Pearsons and your Sel Bennetts — don’t turn your back on them.”

It’s a mission to get here. As rain sheets across Henderson Park, Otahuhu Bronx co-manager Sarah Tepaki counts her boys, including son Edward. Twenty minutes from kick-off, she’s still waiting on three players.

It’s Tepaki’s first year in charge of the Bronx, so named because the team thought their given nom de guerre (Otahuhu Leopards’ junior teams are traditionally called “Cubs”) made them sound like babies. “I asked them for suggestions,” she says. Otahuhu Soldiers, Stallions and Polars were the unsuccessful contenders.

Huddling under a brolly with another mum, Tepaki says her under-12s are a family. “Six of the team have family working at Hills Floorings… Sometimes at smoko we talk tactics. Last week [an 8–4 loss to Manukau], five vans of ‘Hillbillies’ turned up to support us.”

Softly -poken coach Brian Carmont, part-Maori, part-Samoan, also works at Hills (as does his Pakeha father). “My family’s been brought up at the club,” he tells me. “Dad played seniors for Otahuhu; so did my brothers.”

His son Phoenix, a second-rower in his fourth year of the game, is one of the Bronx’s go-to men. He’s certainly got the genes: his uncle George Carmont plays for Wigan. Another uncle on his mum’s side used to play for St Helens.

But one man doesn’t make a team. And Brian Carmont knows his players — all but four in their first season — are up against it.

Meanwhile, Glenora under-12s start their stretches. They look organised — truck- driving coach Joe Tatu has had them five years. Two of his nephews play in the pack. “It’s very family-oriented,” he tells me. “Mums. A lot of the boys are from broken families — it’s always the mums bringing them down to trainings.”

A great bear of a man, Tatu’s tracked by his young charges wherever he goes. “I’ve had them from U8s — my plan’s to stay with them until U18s. Got a few hurdles ahead of me — when they get to the teenage years, find out about girls and get smart attitudes. But they’re good boys.”

Five minutes to kick-off. “Talented little buggers, aren’t they?” grumps an old coot on the sideline. “Won’t be long ’til rugby pinches them.”

Reg is a league man through and through. He tells me about the time, as a boy, Bill Sorensen helped him up on to a tram at Carlaw Park. “He was a Ponsonby centre and a Kiwi. I was a tiny kid. And he just reached down and lifted me up. It was like being picked up by Captain Marvel.”

Like all true leaguies, Reg’s anti-Establishment. “Sure, we have a chip on our shoulder about rugby, but it’s historically justified. The schools have never let us in.”

Otahuhu kick off. From the first play Glenora almost score, fullback Peter Scanlan gliding down the sideline before being scragged five out. Otahuhu scramble back, holding Glenora out for three plays before they succumb.

And for most of the first half, this is the pattern. Otahuhu tackle and tackle and hardly touch the ball, invariably knocking it on when they do. It is from one of their rare thwarted sorties into Glenora’s half that the game’s best play comes.

Scrum. Glenora ball. Passed to Kyle Blunkell, who drifts across the field half-pace, dipping the ball he holds in two hands at defenders, before suddenly stepping, straightening, galloping through the Otahuhu line — “Stop the Palagi!” cries a mum — and then swerving in, then out around the fullback to score. Walking back to his team, he’s awkward, slightly bow-legged, but when he runs — oh, how he runs!

He’s a handy goal-kicker too, twice knocking over conversions, into the wind, from the sideline. Says Tatu, “He lives the game. He’s always at the park, kicking a ball around with his mum.” Kyle Blunkell — remember the name.

Glenora win 52–0. Carmont, a kind, gentle man, gees up his troops, tells them they’ll come harder next week. “And that’s the greatest thing about football,” Reg says. “Next week you start again.

“Look at the Warriors — thumped 52–6 by Manly the other day, but they’ll come back. And the Kiwis — after last year you wouldn’t give them a hope in hell, but I’ll be watching them, mate — too bloody right!

“That’s the thing with league — we have different expectations. You want your team to win, you know they’re capable of winning, but you don’t expect them to. But when they do it, the joy is more intense. It justifies your faith.”

Where did It All Go Wrong?

Sydney. November 25, 2006. Injury-ravaged — and humiliated after the Nathan Fien “Grannygate” nonsense that forced the resignation of NZRL chairman Sel Bennett — the Kiwis fight all the way to the Tri-Nations final, forcing the Kangaroos to extra time before falling 12–16. It’s the last international for Ruben Wiki, Stacey Jones and Nigel Vagana. 139 tests between them. Irreplaceable? Perhaps. Since that great night, New Zealand rugby league has been in freefall.

December 2006: New chairman Andrew Chalmers initiates a $150,000 governance review of the NZRL. “The NZRL is lacking formal governance structures, processes and procedures,” PricewaterhouseCoopers concludes; the NZRL had no charter, no code of conduct, no business plan.

July 2007: A competitions review by the NZRL’s new director of football, Graham Lowe, scraps the 10-team Bartercard Cup, New Zealand’s only semi-professional competition.

July 2007: The NZRL invokes its residency rule — that the Kiwis coach must reside in New Zealand — forcing the resignation of coach Brian “Bluey” McClennan (who’s taken a job with British club Leeds). Gary Kemble named as his replacement.

August 2007: Former NZRL chairman-cum-karaoke club king Graham Carden is jailed for 21 months for fraud relating to poker machine grants.

September 2007: Vodafone Warriors winger Michael Crockett is charged with two counts of sexual intercourse without consent. Crockett denies the charges; he will return to court in June 2008.

October 2007: The Kiwis are walloped 58–0 by Australia in the NZRL’s Centenary Test in Wellington.

October 2007: The Kiwis tour the UK and France — all three tests against Great Britain are lost, the second by a record 44 points.

October 2007: Sex charges are levelled against several Kiwi team members after the Wellington test, though the complainant withdraws these three days later. Nevertheless, a police spokesman says there’s “no suggestion the complaint is a false one”.

November 2007: Coach Kemble expresses dismay at his players’ lack of passion. “Gary is not experienced at international level,” Kiwis captain Roy Asotasi counters. “He has a lot of work to do.”

November 2007: Recent Kiwis Ali Lauitiiti, Tony Puletua, Motu Tony, Iafeta Paleaaesina, Matt Utai, Willie Talau, Francis Meli, David Solomona and Nigel and Joe Vagana join Samoa’s World Cup team.

November 2007: League icons Hugh McGahan and Brent Todd — the latter recently busted for drugs— are implicated in another poker machine grant scam. Todd pleads guilty to defrauding $1 million; McGahan’s case is due before the courts in mid-2008.

November 2007: After less than a year as NZRL chairman — and amid allegations of massive overspending — Andrew Chalmers resigns. The board’s three independent directors, Glenda Hughes, Simon Doig and Eddie Mathews, also step down. Ray Haffenden becomes league’s third chairman in a year.

November 2007: Graham Lowe conducts a review of the disastrous UK/France tour. Bizarrely doesn’t talk to any of the players. Reappoints Kemble.

December 2007: Kiwis captain Asotasi and vice-captain David Kidwell again bag the coach. Kemble rushes off to Australia to shore up his 155-day reign, but resigns on his return home.

December 2007: Following chairman Andrew Chalmers’ million-dollar deal with sportswear company ISC, the NZRL’s longtime kit supplier SAS Sports issues a $3 million suit for breach of contract.

December 2007: The Australian Rugby League quietly gives the NZRL a $400,000 advance on gate receipts for the May 9 Centennial Test.

January 2008: NZRL’s peculiar courtship of supercoach Wayne Bennett continues. Drags on for a month, with several newspapers prematurely anointing the Queenslander. Bennett turns NZRL down — it then turns to neophyte Stephen Kearney (scrapping its residency rule in the process).

January 2008: The Alliances — the five competitions that are the game’s lifeblood in league’s minor districts — are scrapped. Former Kiwi Tawera Nikau blasts NZRL bosses in the Sunday News as “clowns” and “idiots”.

January 2008: Former NZRL chairman Sel Bennett calls for Lowe’s head. “He’s director of football competitions and all he’s done is dismantle them all.” It’s later revealed Lowe’s role was “disestablished” in December 2007, just eight months into his three-year tenure (Lowe is taking legal action against the NZRL).

January 2008: Tea Ropati, scion of league’s first family, is charged with rape and sodomy. After sordid testimony (including CCTV footage of Ropati attempting to perform a sexual act upon a heavily intoxicated woman in a bar), he is found not guilty.

February 2008: NZRL vice-chairman Phil Campbell resigns, rendering the board — usually nine strong, now down to four — without a quorum.

March 2008: Citing lower-than-expected gate receipts and reduced gaming trust grants, the NZRL posts a record $1.7 million loss.