For years, it has only existed in conversation, a quiet hope passed between brothers, never feeling real enough to hold onto.<\/p>\n
With Manase Fainu<\/a> inching toward the light at the end of a long, painful tunnel, that dream is beginning to take shape.<\/p>\n The former NRL<\/a> hooker, once one of the game’s promising young talents, is eligible for parole in October, the same month he turns 28.<\/p>\n He has been using whatever time and space is available to stay fit, to stay ready, to stay connected to a life the game once promised him.<\/p>\n It is a life his three brothers, Sione, Samuela, and Latu, are all living now.<\/p>\n They are all contracted to the Wests Tigers<\/a>, all forging their own paths down a road Manase was the first to walk.<\/p>\n A fourth brother in orange and black could no longer be a fantasy. However, the NRL<\/a> would need to clear Manase’s registration, and a club would need to take a chance on a man whose career collapsed in 2019 when he was accused of stabbing a youth leader during a brawl at a Mormon church dance.<\/p>\n He was stood down under the no-fault stand-down policy, prosecuted, and eventually imprisoned.<\/p>\n Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Samuela Fainu<\/a> revealed his family’s hopes and the weight of the years that have passed.<\/p>\n “As a family, we are extremely close, and it has been difficult for us to be separated from Manase for a number of years,” Samuela said.<\/p>\n “There’s not a day goes by that he’s not in our thoughts.<\/p>\n “My brothers and I have started our own NRL<\/a> journeys on a path he blazed for our family, and he could have been there in person.<\/p>\n “Of course, we’ve spoken about the potential to one day play NRL<\/a> together, but for so long it has just seemed like a distant dream.<\/p>\n “If Manase wants to pick up his rugby league career when the time is right, we will be right behind him.”<\/p>\n Should it ever come to pass, the Fainus would make history.<\/p>\n Only twice in rugby league’s long history have four brothers appeared in top-grade football.<\/p>\n The Normans in 1910 and the Burgess family in 2013.<\/p>\n The mother of the four Fainu brothers, Lile Fainu, would love nothing more than to see Manase return to playing rugby league.<\/p>\n