Barrett "puts team first" and picks house brick over Hastings

Speaking in bursts between rapidly drawing breaths from a paper bag, Trent Barrett has promised to “uphold team stability” at Manly by selecting a house brick at five-eighth.

With his halves stocks further suffering after losing Lachlan Croker in their disastrous failure to Newcastle, Barrett said he will field 16 players and some clay instead of picking Jackson Hastings because “the team is my priority.”

Despite mentioning the exiled utility alongside Mickey Mouse and a host of other implausible options, an inanimate object has been endorsed by the coach in the hope of protecting the club’s culture of pranks and dispiriting losses.

Barrett will now seek a cap break from the NRL to fund the brick, which the club will secretly use on a trip to Mars for Hastings.

Speaking about the club’s injury crisis, the coach admitted “things couldn’t get much worse,” especially after he remembered having a perfectly good human replacement for Croker.

Barrett then pondered if he was being punished by a higher power for playing a season at Cronulla, before pleading for someone to hold him and assure him everything would be alright.

But despite his clear existential crisis, the besieged coach vowed to “do the right thing” and debut a piece of building material because he “cares about the club.”

The Sea Eagles’ injury crisis is the latest in a long line of disasters for Barrett, who has been forced to deal with the Gladstone saga, disunity and illegal back-ended contracts laced with tenuous third-party agreements and traces of Tooves.

But despite the player shortage, he will continue to respect the confected protest that saw Hastings banished from the team by a majority player vote of 12 out of 30.

While careful not to shift blame, Manly has traced all of their woes back to Hastings, including the current slump and other issues like the 1997 grand final loss and the internet.

The club firmly believes had Hastings not invented the internet, a strip club would not have been located while on their road trip to play the Titans.

This would’ve meant the players may have avoided the crisis by being tucked up by 8 pm, safely beating the shit out of each other in their rooms.

But Barrett maintains the club’s unexplained persecution of Hastings for individual, non-football reasons was “nothing personal.”

The coach plans to also lean on captain Daly Cherry-Evans for advice on the saga, who is believed to be blaming the Stewart brothers.

Despite the horror season, Barrett maintained he is still enjoying his time teetering on the brink of insanity as Manly coach.

While acknowledging most have written off the team’s chances, he believes there are plenty of sound minds who still believe in the team, like himself and Kanye West.