Dally Messenger - Accolades

Accolades

The Courtney Goodwill Trophy, international rugby league's first trophy, was presented initially in 1936 and depicted Messenger, along with three other pioneering greats of the code, namely Jean Galia (France), Albert Baskiville (New Zealand) and James Lomas (Britain).

The Dally M. Medal is awarded annually to Australian rugby league's best player, as judged by an expert panel of commentators, whose votes are tallied at the conclusion of each regular playing season. A stand at the Sydney Cricket Ground has also named after Messenger, in recognition of his many outstanding games of club and representative football. In 2003 he was admitted into the Australian Rugby League Hall of Fame.

In 2004, the Royal Agricultural Society Shield held by Messenger's family became part of the National Museum of Australia collection.

In 2007, a century after he was shunned by rugby union for switching to rugby league for 180 pounds, his playing record was formally reinstated.

In February 2008, Messenger was named in a list of Australia's 100 greatest ever players (1908–2007) commissioned by the NRL / ARL to celebrate the code's Australian centenary year. Messenger went on to be named as an interchange player in Australian rugby league's Team of the Century. Announced on 17 April 2008, the team was a selection panel's majority choice for each of the 13 starting positions and four interchange players.

In 2008 New South Wales announced their rugby league team of the century also, naming Messenger on the wing.

Given Messenger's revolutionary impact on the rugby codes, his lasting fame, and the extraordinary degree to which he dominated his contemporaries on the field, some historians would go so far as to call him the finest player of them all. If he were playing today, however, because of the increased average size of footballers, he would probably be reinvented as a halfback (scrum-half). There is no reason to doubt that he would be just as brilliant in this position as he was at centre.

Messenger was immortalised in 2008 by a life-size bronze sculpture created by artist Cathy Weiszmann and erected outside the Sydney Football Stadium. The statue forms the second sculpture in an envisaged 10-part series for the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust's Basil Sellers Sports Sculptures Project.