In the days leading up to Orange Hawks' round three fixture with Lithgow Workies, mayhem struck.
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A bad case the "man flu" ripped through the club and coach Shane Rodney had to call on a number of reinforcements.
"We had five first graders out of our original squad so we had a lot of new faces and the majority of them played a full game of reserve grade," captain Alex Prout said.
"Everyone went down sick."
The illness couldn't keep Hawks down though as a dominant performance led them to score a 28-4 victory at Lithgow.
After an impressive start last week against Nyngan, Hawks were out of the gates early again on Saturday with Prout putting it down to the basics.
We had five first graders out of our original squad so we had a lot of new faces and the majority of them played a full game of reserve grade
- Alex Prout
"We started the game really well, did the simple things right and completed our sets," he said.
"We scored a couple of early tries and made it hard for Lithgow to come back by starving them of the ball."
The main beneficiary of Hawks' strong start was Ben Blimka with the utility scoring one of the quickest hat-tricks of his career to give his side an unassailable lead.
Blimka explained that the players around him were integral in putting him in the right spots to score.
"It's pretty easy to score those tries when you have good players around you. I had Jesse Buchan inside me who was giving me good ball," he said.
"He's (Matt Boss) got a good kicking game and was putting them in the right spots so it made it easy for our outside backs to score those tries.
Starting in a position he's never played before, Blimka said a few messages from the coach kept him calm and assured.
"I wasn't that nervous - Shane told me what I had to do and I felt pretty comfortable being able to do it."
Hawks will now move onto their biggest clash of the year next week with the Orange derby against CYMS with both sides unbeaten.
"We've put ourselves in a good spot going into it and it'll set us up for really good year if we can beat CYMS next weekend," Blimka said.
After two quality starts to games, Prout said a simple mindset is allowing them to kick off in a strong way.
"(It's coming down to) not over-thinking things and completing our sets," the skipper explained.
"It's probably an attitude thing (as well), last week when we played Nyngan we let them back in the game with our own errors so we were really conscious of that this week.
"We were trying to get through our sets and give ourselves the best opportunity to win."
After three wins in a row to start the season, Prout believes there's a good atmosphere growing at Hawks.
"Yeah they're all very happy with it, we had to dig into our depth of the club on the weekend so it's a good club feel, not just in the team but the whole club," he said.
Orange Hawks 28 (Ben Blimka 3, Jake Blimka, unknown tries; Jake Blimka 4 conversions) defeated Lithgow Workies Wolves 4 (Lleyton Lothian try)
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