Glen’s Spirit of Super League Award 2024 – Bill Arthur

The 2024 Glen’s Spirit of Super League will break new ground, as for the first time it is awarded to a broadcaster – Bill Arthur of Sky Sports.

Bill died in July at the age of 68 after a quietly and classily heroic decade-long battle against prostate cancer, and the reaction across Rugby League and well beyond underlined why he is such a fitting winner of the Spirit of Super League Award.

His last match commentary, after a career in broadcasting and journalism stretching back more than 40 years in which he had been a mainstay of Sky Sports’ Rugby League coverage for three decades, was the 2023 Grand Final between Wigan Warriors and Catalans Dragons.

So it is apt that his contribution to the sport should be celebrated at next week’s Rugby League Awards Night, when the Glen’s Spirit of Super League Award will be presented to his family – days before the 2024 Betfred Super League Grand Final at Old Trafford.

It will be the first Grand Final Bill has missed.

For the first Grand Final in 1998, and for the next two decades, he was in his supporting role as pitchside reporter while Eddie and Stevo called the action from the commentary box.

Then in 2019, following the retirement of Eddie Hemmings, Bill commentated on his first Grand Final – St Helens’ victory over Salford Red Devils – and his run of five Grand Finals behind the microphone included probably his most memorable commentary moment in 2020, Jack Welsby’s dramatic late winning try for Saints against Wigan in a match played behind closed doors in Hull because of the Covid pandemic.

The Glen’s Spirit of Super League Award was introduced in 2019, to recognise those who epitomise the values of the sport with a strong emphasis on sportsmanship and community.

They were two of the qualities which Bill Arthur most admired about Rugby League and its players – and which he did so much to champion.

Barrie McDermott, his former Sky Sports colleague who will join Bill’s family in accepting the award on his behalf at next week’s ceremony, said:

“It will be an honour to join Bill’s wife Cherry in accepting this award, and I consider myself very fortunate and privileged to have worked with him so closely for so long, and to have called him a friend as well as a colleague.

“He was a wonderful support to ex-players like me when we started working for Sky, and he had an amazing ability to ask the tough questions that sometimes need to be asked while remaining liked and respected by everyone in the game.

“It is right that we remember him ahead of the Grand Final – the first one he’ll have missed – and I think the list of former winners of this award is also fitting. Bill worked with them all and they sum up the qualities which made him fall in love with Rugby League.

“He was a champion for our sport both in the heartlands and most of all the outposts and for me that’s why he embodied the spirit of Rugby League.”

John Grieveson, Chief Marketing Officer, of Loch Lomond Group, said:

"This is a special award for us to support, celebrating the very best in Rugby League – and we are delighted that for the first time it will go to a member of the media who are very much part of that Rugby League family.

“Sky Sports have been so closely linked to the Super League throughout its first three decades, and Bill Arthur played a huge part in that, as a superb broadcaster who shared his love for the sport and its special qualities with the viewers.”