NRL Grand Final
 |
|
| Locale | Sydney, New South Wales |
|---|---|
| Teams | 2 |
| First meeting | 1998 |
| Latest meeting | 2016 |
| Next meeting | 2017 |
| Broadcasters | Nine Network |
| Stadiums | Stadium Australia |
| Statistics | |
| Meetings total | 98 |
| Most wins | Souths, 21 |
The NRL Grand Final, which determines the Australian rugby league football season's premiers, is one of Australia's major sporting events and one of the largest attended club championship events in the world. Since 1999 it has been contested at Sydney's Stadium Australia, which was the primary athletics venue for the 2000 Olympic Games. The first year it was held at Stadium Australia, the NRL Grand Final broke the record for attendance at an Australian rugby league game, with 107,999 people attending.
The Grand Final had traditionally been played on Sunday afternoons until 2000, the following year saw the game shifted to an evening start. From 2008, a compromise was reached between official broadcaster Nine Network's preferred starting time of 7 pm and the traditional starting time of 3 pm, with the Grand Final beginning at 5 pm AEDT. In 2013 the evening start resumed, the match commencing at 7:15 pm.
Each year the Grand Final Breakfast, a function that is attended by both teams, hundreds of guests and screened live on Australian television is held during the week before the game. However In 2015 the breakfast was cancelled
The game itself is usually preceded by an opening ceremony featuring entertainment and the singing of the national anthem by well-known Australasian and international musical acts. After the pre-game entertainment it is traditional for the Provan-Summons Trophy, the NRL's official premiership trophy, to be delivered to the field by an Australian Army helicopter shortly before kick off.
At the conclusion of the Grand Final there is a presentation ceremony where the winning team are awarded premiership rings. The player judged to be the man-of-the-match by the Australian national team selectors is awarded the prestigious Clive Churchill Medal and the Prime Minister of Australia is typically on-hand to hand the Provan-Summons Trophy to the winning captain.
In 2010 the Government of New South Wales secured the grand final for Stadium Australia until 2022 for $45 million.
First grade rugby league in NSW began in 1908, the first premiership deciding game was played at the Royal Agricultural Society Showground, with Souths defeating Easts 14-12. From 1912 to 1925, no finals system was in place, however in 1916, 1922, 1923 and 1924, a match was played as a tiebreaker to decide the season's premiership winner. From 1926 to 1953, finals were played under the Argus system, which produced a deciding game in two slightly differing ways.
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