Since the NRL era got underway back in 1998, there have been 25 premiership winners.
Now those of you who either played in the backs rather than forwards, or know how to use a calculator, will note that 27 seasons have now elapsed since the NRL began, but don’t forget that Melbourne had premierships taken off them in both 2007 and 2009 due to salary cap breaches, so we’re left with just 25 premierships.
Remarkably, over half of these premierships have been won by just four coaches – Wayne Bennett and Ivan Cleary with four each, and Trent Robinson and Craig Bellamy each with three, but which one of them can claim the title as the greatest coach of the NRL era?
Let’s start with the ‘Old Coach’, Wayne Bennett, who won titles with Brisbane in 1998, 2000 and 2006 before heading to St George Illawarra to help them over the line for their first and only premiership in 2010.
Bennett has a great grand final success rate, winning four of the six deciders his teams have contested since 1998, with his only losses coming in 2015, when Brisbane’s Ben Hunt dropped “that ball” to hand victory to the Cowboys, and again in 2021, when Souths’ five-eighth Cody Walker threw “that pass” to put Penrith’s Stephen Crichton over for the premiership-winning try in the 67th minute.
Wayne Bennett. (Photo by Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
Bennett’s detractors often argue that coaching the only team in a league-mad city like Brisbane gave him an unfair advantage as his side was stacked with QLD-based talent, and perhaps they’re right, as the Broncos could boast the likes of Darren Lockyer, Kevin Walters, Allan Langer, Wendell Sailor, Gorden Tallis, Shane Webcke, just to name a few during that era. Any coach can win a premiership or two with that much talent at his disposal, right?
Of course, this argument fails somewhat when we look at the St George Illawarra team that he took from seventh place in 2008 to the minor premiership the following year and then a premiership in 2010 in just his second year at the helm.
The Dragons’ lineup including Jamie Soward, Ben Hornby, Dean Young, Michael Weyman, Jeremy Smith, Neville Costigan and Ben Creagh could hardly be seen as world beaters, so perhaps success had something to do with the coach after all, and look at how many premierships the Broncos have won without Bennett.
Bennett’s NRL era coaching resume also includes stints with Newcastle, which most see as a failure, and the Dolphins, which despite the NRL’s newest team winning just 20 of the 48 games they played, was hailed as a great success. Bennett has been an NRL coach in every one of the 27 NRL era seasons apart from 2022 when he was preparing the Dolphins for their entry into the big time; and with the exception of Newcastle in 2012 and 2014, and the Dolphins in 2023 and 2024, Bennett’s teams have made the finals every year. He has an overall NRL era winning record of 60.30 per cent.
It’s also worth noting that Bennett’s NRL success has come while he’s also been engaged in some considerable extra-curricular representative coaching activities, having coached Queensland, Australia and England/Great Britain during this time, and he’s not called the ‘Old Coach’ for nothing, as he was nearly 50 years of age when the NRL era commenced.
With that record, the title of greatest coach of the NRL era appears to be Wayne Bennett’s to lose, but how do the other contenders stack up?
(Photo by Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images)
The only other coach with four titles to his name in the NRL era is, of course, Penrith’s Ivan Cleary, who has presided over the Panthers’ unprecedented string of victories in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
While winning four premierships at any time is a special achievement, winning four premierships in a row is a remarkable feat, especially when you consider that the only other coach to achieve even consecutive premierships in the NRL era is the Roosters’ Trent Robinson in 2018 and 2019, and the last club to win four in a row was St George during their eleven-year reign between 1956 and 1966.
Ivan Cleary began his top-level coaching career with the Warriors back in 2006, and in the six seasons he spent in Auckland he took them to the finals four times including their grand final loss to Manly in 2011, before embarking on his first stint with the then struggling Penrith side in 2012.
He had only marginal success with Penrith over the following four years, and apart from making it as far as the preliminary final in 2014, the club finished well out of contention in 2012, 2013 and 2015. At the end of 2015, an apparently “tired” Ivan Cleary was punted by Penrith supremo Gus Gould, and then Cleary took his ill-fated “bus” down the road to the Wests Tigers for the 2017 and 2018 seasons, before unceremoniously bailing on the Tigers and rejoining Penrith in 2019. The rest, as they say, is history.
Having all the stars align to win a one-off premiership is one thing but maintaining the playing standard, team harmony, desire and commitment to chase success year after year is another, especially in the light of the salary cap pressure which has seen the Panthers necessarily shed a host of premiership-winning players in recent years, including the likes of Matt Burton, Stephen Crichton, Spencer Leniu, Apisai Koroisau, Viliame Kikau and Kurt Capewell.
Ivan Cleary can take a large part of the ongoing commitment, hunger for success and unique club culture that Penrith has shown since his arrival at the foot of the mountains. Cleary’s coaching, together with the club’s astute recruitment and ability to continually produce the next crop of talented players, has seen the Panthers play in each of the last five premiership deciders, a feat that no other coach is likely to emulate in the foreseeable future.
Cleary has now coached over 450 first grade games with an impressive overall win percentage of 57 per cent. He has taken his teams to the finals in ten out of 18 seasons, and like Wayne Bennett, has won four of the six grand finals that he’s contested.
So, is Cleary’s remarkable four-in-a-row feat enough to take him past Bennett, or is Wayne still ahead as the greatest coach of the NRL era?
(Photo by Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)
The next contender is Melbourne’s Craig Bellamy. With five grand final wins to his name, no coach has won more deciders in the NRL era than Bellyache. Unfortunately though, only three of the five are counted as premiership wins, as both the 2007 and 2009 titles were stripped from the club due to salary cap breaches. Interestingly, no coach has lost more grand finals in the NRL era than Bellamy either, as the Storm finished runners-up in 2006, 2008, 2016, 2018 and 2024.
A one-club coach, the 2024 season was Bellamy’s 22nd consecutive year at the helm of the Storm, and his results are nothing short of staggering. In his 22 seasons with Melbourne, and disregarding the 2010 season when they played for zero points as part of their salary cap breach punishment, the Storm have made the finals every year, took out the minor premiership on nine occasions, played in ten grand finals, and never finished lower than sixth on the table.
Even in the 2010 season, when they played for zero points, the Storm won 15 of their 26 games which would have seen them finish in third place but for the salary cap penalty.
The salary cap breach was a dark period for Melbourne and the fallout would have been enough to send most clubs into a tailspin for the next decade, but Craig Bellamy had other ideas, and under his leadership the club bounced back in 2011 to take out the minor premiership and then won the competition in 2012, recording Bellamy’s first premiership. It takes a special leader to do that, and it also takes an inspirational and astute coach to consistently turn “no name” players into premiership winners, and that has been a shining feature of Craig Bellamy’s time in bleak city.
Craig Bellamy has also put his hand up for some extra-curricular coaching over the years, both with the Country Origin team across the 2005 to 2007 seasons, and also with NSW, where three series with the Blues saw his side win just two of the nine games contested.
Despite his poor results on the representative front, Bellamy’s club coaching results are next level, and no other coach in the NRL era gets even close to his win ratio of 69.6 per cent over some 579 games. Historically, the only coaches with 50 or more games to have bettered that phenomenal success rate were Dally Messenger with 78 per cent from 59 games with Eastern Suburbs during the game’s formative years, and Howard Hallett with 75.9 per cent from 54 games with Souths in the early 1920s.
Bellamy is clearly a winning coach, but is his overall reputation diminished by the salary cap fiasco or enhanced by it because of the way he responded and succeeded in dragging the club back to the top in its aftermath? With just three premierships, is he better than either four-time winners Wayne Bennett or Ivan Cleary?
Trent Robinson. (Photo by Mark Evans/Getty Images)
The last, and arguably the least of the contenders is the Roosters’ Trent Robinson who, like Craig Bellamy, has three premierships to his name and has spent his NRL coaching career with just one club.
Robinson served his coaching apprenticeship in the south of France before replacing Brian Smith at the helm of the Roosters in 2013, and boy, didn’t he have an immediate impact, taking the club from a dismal 13th in 2012 to a top-of-the-table finish and a premiership in his first season as an NRL coach, joining Michael Hagan (Knights 2001) and Ricky Stuart (Roosters 2002) as the only other coaches to conjure a first-up win in the NRL era.
Of course, Souths fans and other Trent Robinson detractors will point to the Roosters’ legendary salary cap sombrero and credit the win to the recruitment that year of the likes of Sonny Bill Williams, Michael Jennings, James Maloney, Sam Moa and Luke O’Donnell rather than Robinson’s coaching, but astute recruitment and fitting new players into a cohesive unit and winning club culture is all part of a coach’s job.
Robinson has gone on to prove that 2013 was no flash in the pan, taking his team to the finals every year since 2013 with the exception of 2016 when they fell off a cliff to finish 15th, and he famously became the first coach to achieve back-to-back premierships in the NRL era during the Cooper Cronk-inspired 2018 and 2019 seasons. Prior to that feat, you had to look back to the Broncos in 1992 and 1993 for the last club to win consecutive titles.
Interestingly, Trent Robinson’s win percentage of 63.3 per cent shades that of both Wayne Bennett and Ivan Cleary and he’s never lost a grand final, winning all three he’s contested with the Roosters, but does his overall record stack up against Bennett, Cleary and Bellamy?
So there they are, my contenders for the title of “greatest coach of the NRL era”.
Who do you think deserves that accolade?
Tonyhttps://https://ift.tt/M6fOx3m, Wayne, Bellyache or Robbo – who is the greatest coach of the NRL era?
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