The Super League Grand Final (commonly referred to as the Grand Final) is the championship-deciding game of the Super League rugby league football competition. The game is played between two teams who have qualified via a play-off structure, the teams who compete in these play-offs having been decided by the league positions after the end of the regular season's weekly rounds.
Use of a play-off system to decide the Championship brought back a rugby league tradition. The Super League Premiership, which had previously taken place between the highest placed teams in the competition, was discontinued as the purpose of its original incarnation had been to take the place of the previous Championship-deciding play-off system.
The Super League Grand Final was introduced for the 1998 season. The inaugural Grand Final match was played that year on Saturday 24 October, between Wigan Warriors and Leeds Rhinos. The venue of every Super League Grand Final to date has been Old Trafford, Manchester.
The Harry Sunderland Trophy is the award given to the man-of-the-match in the Grand Final.
Read more about Super League Grand Final: Results, Statistics, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words league, grand and/or final:
“I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best—it’s all they’ll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money—provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don’t need it.”
—Peter De Vries (b. 1910)
“We had heard of a Grand Fall on this stream, and thought that each fall we came to must be it, but after christening several in succession with this name, we gave up the search. There were more Grand or Petty Falls than I can remember.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)