The Clive Churchill Medal Explained: Judging, History and Winners

The Clive Churchill Medal goes to the player judged best on the ground in the NRL grand final. It has been awarded every year since 1986, it is decided by the selectors of the Australian national team, and it is presented on the field within minutes of full-time, before the premiership trophy changes hands.

That is a very different thing from a season award. The Dally M Medal rewards twenty-six weeks of accumulated influence. The Clive Churchill Medal rewards eighty minutes, on the one afternoon or evening when the whole competition is watching, and it does not care whether your team won.

That last point is the interesting one. Four players have taken the medal home from the losing dressing room, and the possibility of it happening again is live in every close grand final. This guide covers who Churchill was, how the panel works, the four losing-side winners, the retrospective medals awarded back to 1954, every winner since 1986, and the women's equivalent presented on the same afternoon.

What the medal actually is

It is a single-match best-on-ground award for the NRL grand final, and nothing else. There is no shortlist published in advance, no points system, no accumulated tally and no public vote. A panel watches the match and names a player.

The medal itself is struck each year and presented during the post-match ceremony at Accor Stadium, which has hosted the decider since 1999. The presentation order matters to the people involved: the medal comes first, then the Provan-Summons Trophy, then the winners' lap. A losing-side medallist therefore has to walk out, accept the award and walk back before the other team lifts the premiership.

The award covers the men's premiership. The women's grand final, played on the same day, has its own medal named for Karyn Murphy.

Who Clive Churchill was

Clive Churchill was born in Newcastle in 1927 and played twelve seasons at South Sydney between 1947 and 1958. He was a fullback of about five foot seven, which is where the nickname came from: The Little Master.

The reason his name is on the medal rather than someone else's is that he changed what the position was for. Before Churchill, fullback in rugby league was essentially a defensive job — catch the ball, kick it back, make the last tackle. Churchill ran it back. He counter-attacked from deep, joined the line, and treated the position as an attacking one. Every modern fullback in the game, and a good proportion of the modern winners of this medal, are working in a role he defined.

The record is substantial on its own terms. Five premierships as a Souths player, in 1950, 1951, 1953, 1954 and 1955. Thirty-eight Tests for Australia and twenty-four Tests as captain across six years. Then three more premierships as coach of the same club, in 1967, 1968 and 1970, from a coaching career of nearly three hundred first-grade matches at close to a fifty-seven per cent win rate.

He was named one of the original four Immortals in 1981. He died in August 1985, and the medal was created for the following season's grand final.

How the winner is chosen

The panel is the selectors of the Australian national team — the people who pick the Kangaroos. That is the whole mechanism, and it is deliberately simple.

1. 1The panel is seatedThe selectors of the Australian national team watch the grand final live from the ground, with no brief beyond identifying the best player on the field.
2. 2Both sides are in playThere is no rule restricting the award to the winning team, so a player from the beaten side is under consideration for the full eighty minutes.
3. 3A decision is reached lateThe panel settles on a name in the closing minutes so the medal can be engraved and announced almost immediately after the siren.
4. 4The announcement is madeThe winner is named on the field during the post-match ceremony, before the premiership trophy is presented.
5. 5A previous winner presents itBy convention the medal is placed around the winner's neck by a former recipient, which is the small ritual that carries the award forward.
6. 6The votes stay privateNo breakdown is released, so the margin between the winner and the next candidate is never public and the decision cannot be relitigated on the numbers.

Describes the standard sequence at an NRL grand final. Individual panel votes have never been published, so the deliberation step is described from what the NRL and panel members have said publicly rather than from a vote record.

There is no published rubric. The panel is not told to weight metres over tackles, or tries over try assists, or to discount a player whose team lost. It is asked, in effect, the question a crowd asks itself: who was the best player out there.

That produces decisions that a statistical model would not always make, and it produces them fast. A points-based system would need the full match data and would not be ready for the presentation, which happens roughly five minutes after the siren. The speed is a feature. The medal belongs to the night rather than to the following week.

Why the votes are never published

They simply are not released, and the effect is worth noting because it is the opposite of the Dally M design.

The Dally M count is a piece of theatre precisely because the numbers are read out. The Clive Churchill Medal has no numbers to read. A player either got it or did not, and there is no second place, no vote margin, and no way to argue that somebody finished half a point behind.

This makes contested decisions harder to sustain as controversies. When a grand final produces two obvious candidates, the debate lasts a day, because there is nothing to point at. It also removes any suggestion of a countback: there has never been a tie in the award's history and the structure makes one effectively impossible.

Winning it from the losing side

This is the feature that separates the medal from most best-on-ground awards in Australian sport, and it has happened four times.

90%10%

• Winner from the premiership side36
• Winner from the beaten side4

Counts the 40 contemporary medals awarded from 1986 through the 2025 grand final. Retrospective medals for the 1954 to 1985 deciders are excluded.

Show the numbers

Where the medal has gone, 1986 to 2025

Item	Value
Winner from the premiership side	36
Winner from the beaten side	4

Once every decade, roughly, the panel decides that the best player on the field was in the team that lost. It is not an accident or an oversight in the rules — the award has never been restricted to the winning side, and the panel treats that literally.

The four are worth taking one at a time, because each says something slightly different about how the medal is judged.

Bradley Clyde, Canberra, 1991. Clyde had won the medal two years earlier in the Raiders' 1989 win, and in 1991 he won it again in a grand final Canberra lost to Penrith. A lock forward taking it twice in three years, once in defeat, is the clearest statement the panel has ever made about what the award is for. He remains the only player to have won it from both sides of a result.

Brad Mackay, St George, 1993. Brisbane beat St George, and Mackay was judged the best player on the ground. This one is remembered as the purest example of the category: a beaten side, an outstanding individual, and a panel that did not blink.

Daly Cherry-Evans, Manly, 2013. The Sydney Roosters won the premiership; the medal went to Manly's halfback. Cherry-Evans was in his third season and the award arrived a long way ahead of the rest of his career honours.

Jack Wighton, Canberra, 2019. The Roosters again, this time beating Canberra, and again the medal crossed the field. Wighton was playing five-eighth. The decision was debated, as they all are, but it fit an established pattern rather than breaking one.

Notice that Canberra account for two of the four. That is coincidence rather than pattern, but it is a coincidence that Raiders supporters have had to live with.

Every winner since 1986

Year	Player	Position	Club	Result
1986	Peter Sterling	Halfback	Parramatta	Won
1987	Cliff Lyons	Five-eighth	Manly	Won
1988	Paul Dunn	Prop	Canterbury	Won
1989	Bradley Clyde	Lock	Canberra	Won
1990	Ricky Stuart	Halfback	Canberra	Won
1991	Bradley Clyde	Lock	Canberra	Lost
1992	Allan Langer	Halfback	Brisbane	Won
1993	Brad Mackay	Lock	St George	Lost
1994	David Furner	Second-row	Canberra	Won
1995	Jim Dymock	Lock	Sydney Bulldogs	Won
1996	Geoff Toovey	Halfback	Manly	Won
1997	Robbie O'Davis	Fullback	Newcastle	Won
1998	Gorden Tallis	Second-row	Brisbane	Won
1999	Brett Kimmorley	Halfback	Melbourne	Won
2000	Darren Lockyer	Fullback	Brisbane	Won
2001	Andrew Johns	Halfback	Newcastle	Won
2002	Craig Fitzgibbon	Second-row	Sydney Roosters	Won
2003	Luke Priddis	Hooker	Penrith	Won
2004	Willie Mason	Prop	Bulldogs	Won
2005	Scott Prince	Halfback	Wests Tigers	Won
2006	Shaun Berrigan	Hooker	Brisbane	Won
2007	Greg Inglis	Five-eighth	Melbourne	Won
2008	Brent Kite	Prop	Manly	Won
2009	Billy Slater	Fullback	Melbourne	Won
2010	Darius Boyd	Fullback	St George Illawarra	Won
2011	Glenn Stewart	Lock	Manly	Won
2012	Cooper Cronk	Halfback	Melbourne	Won
2013	Daly Cherry-Evans	Halfback	Manly	Lost
2014	Sam Burgess	Lock	South Sydney	Won
2015	Johnathan Thurston	Halfback	North Queensland	Won
2016	Luke Lewis	Second-row	Cronulla	Won
2017	Billy Slater	Fullback	Melbourne	Won
2018	Luke Keary	Five-eighth	Sydney Roosters	Won
2019	Jack Wighton	Five-eighth	Canberra	Lost
2020	Ryan Papenhuyzen	Fullback	Melbourne	Won
2021	Nathan Cleary	Halfback	Penrith	Won
2022	Dylan Edwards	Fullback	Penrith	Won
2023	Nathan Cleary	Halfback	Penrith	Won
2024	Liam Martin	Second-row	Penrith	Won
2025	Reece Walsh	Fullback	Brisbane	Won

Read straight through, the list is a reasonable index of which clubs have been good and when. Canberra's late 1980s and early 1990s. Brisbane through the 1990s. Melbourne from 1999 onward. Manly across three separate eras. Penrith's four straight from 2021.

Which positions win it

Halfback12

Fullback8

Lock6

Second-row5

Five-eighth4

Prop3

Hooker2

Counts the 40 contemporary medals only, using the position each winner played in that grand final. Retrospective awards for 1954 to 1985 are excluded, and players who changed positions across their careers are counted where they played on the day.

Show the numbers

Clive Churchill Medal winners by position, 1986 to 2025

Item	Value
Halfback	12
Fullback	8
Lock	6
Second-row	5
Five-eighth	4
Prop	3
Hooker	2

Halves and fullbacks take exactly half the medals, which is a heavy skew but a much milder one than the season award produces. Forwards have won fourteen of the forty. Three props have won it. Two hookers have won it.

The difference in structure explains why. Across a season, judges are asked repeatedly which player most influenced a match, and the players who touch the ball most win that argument by accumulation. In a single grand final, a forward who carries for two hundred metres in a tight, low-scoring, defensive contest is doing the most visible thing on the field, and the panel is watching one match rather than averaging twenty-six.

Grand finals also tend to be tighter than regular-season games. A decider settled 10-8 is a forwards' match by definition, and the awards from those matches reflect it. For more on what each position is actually doing out there, see the guide to NRL positions.

The multiple winners

• 40Medals awarded since 1986
• 3Most medals, all time
• 2Most since 1986, one player
• 3Two-time winners since 1986
• 4Winners from a losing team

The medal total counts contemporary awards from 1986 to 2025. The all-time record for most medals includes retrospective awards made in 2008 for grand finals played between 1954 and 1985.

Since 1986, three players have won it twice. Bradley Clyde in 1989 and 1991. Billy Slater in 2009 and 2017, eight years apart and at two very different stages of a career. Nathan Cleary in 2021 and 2023.

Slater's pair is the one that stands out. Winning a grand final best-on-ground award as a twenty-six-year-old fullback and then again at thirty-four, in a club's third premiership across that span, is a record of longevity as much as of brilliance.

Cleary's is a different kind of achievement, because Penrith won four consecutive premierships from 2021 to 2024 and the medal went to four different sets of hands across those years: Cleary, Dylan Edwards, Cleary again, then Liam Martin. A dynasty that spread its grand final honours around three players is unusual, and it says something about how evenly that side was built.

The retrospective medals

The award did not exist before 1986, which left every grand final from the code's early decades without a named best player. In 2008, for the centenary of rugby league in Australia, the NRL closed the gap.

A historians' committee was assembled to award medals retrospectively for the grand finals played between 1954 and 1985. The method was archival: match footage where it survived, newspaper reports from the following Monday, record books, and consultation with the players and coaches who were still alive to be asked. Clive Churchill himself was among the recipients, which gives the medal a neat circularity.

The retrospective awards are recognised alongside the contemporary ones in the official record. That is why the name at the top of the all-time list is not one of the modern winners.

Norm Provan's three

Norm Provan holds the record with three medals — 1957, 1958 and 1963 — all awarded retrospectively. He was a second-rower and later a lock for St George during the club's eleven consecutive premierships, and he captain-coached four of them.

Provan is also the taller half of the photograph that produced the premiership trophy, taken after the 1963 grand final, in which he and Arthur Summons walk off a mud heap arm over shoulder. So the man with the most Clive Churchill Medals is also the man on the trophy that gets presented immediately after the medal. He was elevated to Immortal status in 2018.

Graham Eadie holds two, for the 1976 and 1978 grand finals, both with Manly. Brett Kenny holds two, for 1982 and 1983 with Parramatta, during the Eels' run of three premierships in four years.

Which clubs have the most

Melbourne lead with six since 1986: Kimmorley in 1999, Inglis in 2007, Slater in 2009 and 2017, Cronk in 2012 and Papenhuyzen in 2020. Manly, Canberra, Brisbane and Penrith all have five.

The club table is less revealing than it looks, because only two clubs are eligible each year. A club that plays ten grand finals has ten chances; a club that plays two has two. The tally is close to a straight function of how often a club has reached the last Saturday in September or the first in October, which is covered in the NRL finals system guide.

Canberra's five are the outlier, because two of them came from grand finals the club lost. No other club has more than one losing-side medal.

The Karyn Murphy Medal

The NRLW grand final has its own best-on-ground award, presented on the same afternoon at the same ground.

Season	Winner	Club
2018	Kimiora Breayley-Nati	Brisbane
2019	Annette Brander	Brisbane
2020	Amber Hall	Brisbane
2021	Sarah Togatuki	Sydney Roosters
2022	Tamika Upton	Newcastle
2023	Tamika Upton	Newcastle
2024	Tarryn Aiken	Sydney Roosters
2025	Mele Hufanga	Brisbane

Karyn Murphy was a hooker who played twenty-eight Tests for the Jillaroos and captained them, and she has since been one of the most influential administrators in the game, running the NRL's integrity unit before returning to coaching. In 2024 she was among the first six women inducted into the NRL Hall of Fame, alongside Natalie Dwyer, Katrina Fanning, Tarsha Gale, Veronica White and Tahnee Norris.

Tamika Upton is the only player to have won the medal twice, in consecutive years with Newcastle. She is also a fullback, which is the position that has come to dominate the women's award in much the way it has grown in the men's. The NRLW guide covers the competition's structure and its expansion.

How it differs from the Dally M Medal

The two awards get confused, usually by people who have just watched both presented within a fortnight of each other.

The Dally M Medal is a season award. Two judges vote three, two and one after every regular-season match, votes are published until roughly Round 12 and then hidden, and the count is read out at a televised ceremony before the grand final. Finals matches do not count toward it at all.

The Clive Churchill Medal is a one-match award for the grand final itself, judged by a different panel, presented on the field, with no vote breakdown ever released.

The practical consequence is that they measure different things and frequently reward different players. A player can be the best in the competition across twenty-six rounds and then be quiet in the decider. A player can have an ordinary season and produce eighty minutes that nobody who watched will forget. Johnathan Thurston is one of the small number to have held both at once, taking the 2015 Clive Churchill Medal in North Queensland's first premiership.

What actually wins the medal on the day

Watching for it is a reasonable way to add interest to a grand final, and there are patterns.

The strongest single predictor is a fullback or halfback whose team wins a high-scoring match. If a side scores four or more tries and the fullback has a hand in three of them, the decision is close to made. Reece Walsh's 2025 award — a try, three try assists, four line-break assists and a set of try-saving plays in a Brisbane comeback from ten points down — is the archetype.

The second pattern is the forward in a low-scoring grind. When a grand final is settled by a single score, the panel looks at the middle of the field, and props and locks come into contention because the match was decided there.

The third is the losing-side performance so obvious it cannot be ignored. That requires a defeat narrow enough that the individual is not swamped by the result — all four losing-side medals came in matches decided by fewer than ten points.

What rarely wins it is a good performance in a blowout. If a grand final is over by half-time, the panel tends to reward the player who broke it open rather than the player who accumulated numbers afterwards.

The fullback effect

Fullbacks have won eight of the forty. Six of those eight have come since 1997, and five since 2009.

This is not a change in the medal. It is a change in the game. The modern fullback runs the ball out of trouble, joins the attacking line as an extra playmaker, sweeps behind the defensive line, and is involved in a far higher share of a team's possessions than a fullback of the 1980s. That is a direct inheritance from what Churchill started, which makes the pattern a fitting one for an award carrying his name.

The other structural change is the ball-playing fullback as a second half of the spine, which the six-again rule accelerated by increasing the number of sets and the amount of broken-field running in a match. More fatigue, more space, more chances for the player positioned to exploit it.

Forwards and the medal

Fourteen of forty is a better return for forwards than any comparable Australian award, and the three props are worth naming: Paul Dunn in 1988, Willie Mason in 2004 and Brent Kite in 2008.

Kite's is the most instructive. Manly won the 2008 grand final by a very wide margin, and the medal went to a prop who did not score. The panel's reasoning was that the match had been won in the middle of the field in the first twenty minutes, and it named the player who did that. It is the clearest example of the award being decided on what happened rather than on what the scoreline recorded.

Hookers have two: Luke Priddis in 2003 and Shaun Berrigan in 2006. Centres and wingers have none since 1986, which is the notable absence — the two positions that most often finish tries have never produced a winner in the modern era.

Contested decisions

Every award of this type produces arguments, and this one produces a specific kind because there is no vote record to appeal to.

The recurring complaint is that the panel decides too early. Because the medal has to be announced within minutes of the siren, a candidate settled on at the seventy-minute mark cannot easily be displaced by something that happens at seventy-eight. Whether that has ever actually changed an outcome is unknowable, which is precisely the problem with an unpublished vote.

The second recurring complaint is the mirror of the medal's best feature. When it goes to a losing player, a portion of the winning side's supporters take it as a slight, and when it does not go to an obvious losing candidate, the beaten club's supporters take that as one too. There is no version of the rule that avoids both.

The third is positional, and it applies less here than to the season awards. Nobody seriously argues that the Clive Churchill Medal ignores forwards, because the record shows it does not.

What it is worth to a player

There is no announced prize money and no bonus for it in the standard playing contract. What it does is far more valuable than either.

Grand final best on ground is the single most portable line in an Australian rugby league career. It survives club changes, it survives a decline in form, and it is the first thing named in an introduction twenty years later. It also arrives in the first week of October, at the exact moment the off-season market opens, which puts it in front of every club with cap space. How that space is managed is covered in the NRL salary cap and in the guide to recruitment and contracts.

For a young player it can also reset a representative career. A medal in October is a strong argument for a State of Origin jersey the following June, and several winners have made that jump directly.

How to watch the presentation

If you are at the ground or watching the broadcast, the sequence after the siren is worth knowing so you do not miss it.

Both teams stay on the field. A stage is assembled near the halfway line. The Clive Churchill Medal is announced first, and the winner walks up alone — which is why a losing-side award produces one of the more awkward and more memorable images in Australian sport. A previous winner presents it.

The Provan-Summons Trophy follows, lifted by the winning captain. Then the lap. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes and the medal is over in the first three, so if you are leaving early to beat the traffic at Accor Stadium, you will miss it. The practicalities of the day are covered in the grand final guide and the general attending an NRL game guide.

What the medal actually measures

It measures what a small panel of national selectors thought about one match, decided under time pressure, without a published method and without a requirement that the player finished on the winning side.

That is narrow, subjective and fast, and those are its three virtues. A season award can be modelled. A grand final award decided in real time by people who pick the national team is a judgement, and judgement is what a crowd is making at the same moment.

Forty medals in, the list has a shape that most supporters would recognise as fair. Halves and fullbacks lead it, as they lead every award in the game. Forwards are properly represented, which the season awards cannot claim. And four times the panel has looked past the result and named the best player anyway, which is the thing most best-on-ground awards in most sports quietly decline to do.

More on the code, its clubs and its grounds is in the Australia section, the rugby index and the wider sports hub. For the season-long award presented a fortnight earlier see the Dally M Medal, for the ground where most of these medals were won see Accor Stadium and Suncorp Stadium, and for how the two rugby codes differ in the way they hand out honours see rugby league versus rugby union.