To be fair to McCoy that is a worthy winner even if it wouldn't have happened if held in another city. Didnt Chris Hoy win it last year? Just need to hold it at the Leeds Arena again and give it to Sinfield or Peacock

The Northern Ireland coach though. Whilst they haven't qualified for a major in ages it was hardly the toughest group and 40% of their qualifiers took place in 2014 for goodness sakes.

An incredible achievement ....amazing to think that in any of the previous ceremonies the amount of votes would (many many times) have given him podium position.

A year Kevin (and the rest of us) will never forget: it couldn't have happened to a greater bloke. A fine way to bow out for a true ambassador for the sport.... Imagine if Tyson Fury had been the RL contender

The Leeds club should highlight and thank the whole RL community for the wonderful response to the plea for all RL supporters to put aside their tribal instincts and join the effort in voting.

Great to also admit a tear for Lizzie Jones' peformance

Well done KS from a Giants Fan, Not the best player I have seen in Leeds colours in 50 years of watching but a credit to Leeds and the game, Shame he didn't' come 1st

I was exactly the same. Tried phoning about 8 times and each one didn't get through. Pretty sure if I was phoning for Murray each one would have been recorded.

Oh well, before it was announced I was saying top 3 would be an amazing achievement and I stand by that. Not just for our club but for the whole sport. He wouldn't have done it if only Leeds fans voted for him, so thanks to the family. I would certainly have voted if it was a different RL player.

The icing would have been Brian Mc getting coach of the year. But I think the Leeds Rhinos have certainly made their mark

In line with his odds with the bookies I was hoping/expecting he'd manage to get 3rd spot ahead of Fury (whose odds had lowered nearer to Sinfield's in the last day or two).

But when Ennis-Hill was announced in 3rd their was about 20 seconds when I thought "bloody hell, maybe just maybe", It was as nervous as a Grand Final.

1st would've been amazing but just glad he made the top 3 and did so with such a massive total of votes. On the red button afterwards Steve Bunce made a great comment saying every year the smaller sports in terms of media coverage always say they're going to vote heavy and get their guy into the the top 3 but never really get close, however RL fans backed up their claim big time and praised them for it.....a comment made better by the obvious frustration in John Inverdale's voice that RL was getting such praise.

Well done to Sir Kevin from a Wigan fan.....

Anybody who used their own club loyalty as an excuse to not vote for him, is a total kno$head.... Sorry mods..

Seemed far fewer than I'd expected. Full credit to you and all the others who set rivalry aside. I'll be ashamed if Leeds fans don't reciprocate should there be another nominee from another club somewhere down the line.

First time I've watched the thing in years. I don't know why but I lways think of Eton Rifles by The Jam, "what chance have you got against a tie and a crest".

It was a really good line up though, several world champions (and not at f******g snooker either). Peaty is multiple world champ and record holder, Mo Farah is the greatest distance runner - probably of all time, Jess Ennis is one of the all time great atheletes, and we had a double tour winner up there. Thought Tyson Fury managed to talk unedited for 3 minutes without making a fool of himself.
There have been years when any one of them could have walked it - christ in the 70's they gave it to princess Anne and in the 80's Steve Davis won it (in an Olympic Year!) and Greg Rusedski won it in 1997 on the back of losing in the US Open final ( a year so diabolically bad that Tm Henman was runner up on the back of achieveing absolutely nothing that year).

Kev has been the image RL needed, he was starting is career just as the game was transitioning to full time professional and he was playing senior rugby when the game began to actually behave like it was full time professional - it took a few years for the message to get through that being a full time pro didn't mean that you had more time recover from your hangover. The only thing I would disagree with him about is that he underestimates just how skillful a player he has been. He had the lot for me, we dismiss things like concentration, fitness, goal kicking, tackling technique, just being able to catch (many can't and it shows) as not being skills, but take them away from a player and you have a bit of pace and a long pass. Pretty useless on their own. We also forget some of the amazing things he has done with the ball in hand because he played so many games. But what he has had through his entire career is superb "game sense". It's the hardest thing to coach and the most important thing in any team sport.
Sometimes you work hard, you have the right attitude on and off the field, you give as much as you can to the people around you and you get rewarded (not always). Congrats to the greatest Leeds player of them all.

And, I don't begrudge Murray the win. Yes, the "whatever" cup is the equivalent of the Johnstone's Paint Trophy, yes, they put him on last, yes they had him sat in the front row and continually cut to him though the entire show so you didn't forget who you were supposed to be voting for but the SPOTY always had the "captures the public imagination" tagline (although how Steve Davis managed to do that is a total mystery to me) which basically means the sport the BBC shows - and they showed all the Davis Cup and people got into it. Murray is a good guy, he works impossibly hard and is a credit to his sport - which is rediculously competitive at all ages and very, very hard to succeed in.

I might actually watch it next year - just as long as they don't give it to that arrogant, selfish p**k Lewis Hamilton. Lewis, it's the car mate

A song partly inspired by a brawl with some of the touring Kangaroos in the Queens Hotel where The Jam were also staying. They came out of it naturally the worst.

As for the show in general I think it's got poorer as a review of the year since they extended the nominees list from 6 up to 12. It takes them that long to interview everyone and leave 30 mins for voting and handing out the other awards that the don't really show in better detail the events that happened. Some people I saw complain that apart from Sinfield's interview they didn't really show what happened in the finals but I think that was true of most of the sports. Should extended by 30 mins and show some of the key events in greater detail. It use to have sections for each sport, this year it was just "this happened in Winter, this happened in Spring, this....." Etc.

Every club did and majority of their fans seemingly with of course the minority of bitter childish ones and I see no reason why Leeds wouldn't be the same (including the minority of bitter ones who wouldn't vote).

One thing for a fan to sh*t on the nomination but Rod Studd was showing himself to be the idiot he is once again on his Twitter. The guy gets paid to commentate and touch line report on RL, so even if he disagreed with it surely he could keep him mouth shut for the good of the game rather than criticise the nomination and have a pop at those who campaigned for votes. Bet he didn't sh*t all over Phil Taylor's nomination back in 2009 when he finished 2nd.

Well each to their own I suppose, for those that did thanks, for those that didn't, also thanks.

Don't know where Rod got the idea that it was "A protest vote for RL coverage" from? Bit odd? Where did he get that from?

Whatever Rod. ATEOTD it's not like he even scraped 2nd place is it? he was nearly 200k votes up on 3rd place and in many other years could have won the whole thing. Andy Murray will have had a huge amount of backing from Scottish voters and a bulk of southern middle aged, middle class housewives and last year all the petrol heads got behind Hamilton to get him the win.A bizzare comment from a man supposedly within the game of RL.

He didn't seem happy that people could vote more than once and the multiple voting wasn't right. Thing is I saw something on Twitter that said apparently 50,000 people/phones voted for Sinfield and by ringing multiple times it bumped his total up to 278k.

If that 50k number is correct that would still be enough for 4th place and surely Fury and Ennis-Hill had fans who voted multiple times too. Even if it wasn't on the same scale of the 20 votes = a pint thing, even if their fans voted just twice on average that means less than 40k for those two which again means Sinfield would be 2nd.

I don't see it as being "disloyal" to RL for Rod Studd to express the opinion he did. He's a freelance reporter and commentator, RL is just a small part of his work.

Bit odd that he picked this year to suddenly get uppity about the SPOTY voting system though, which has been open to this kind of widespread abuse and campaign for as long as it's been going. What happened with Sinfield is no different to what happened with others before him, where a whole sport got behind one particular nominee.

Anyone who has seen Studd on BackChat though knows what his MO is. He looks to make outlandish statements to provoke response and debate, often clinging to his point once it's been truly shredded by logic. He's something of a poor man's Stevo in that regard.

As it happens though, I don't agree with multiple votes either. It's a bit hypocritical to complain about things being "rigged", as I've seen others do on these forums, then set about trying to rig it by casting multiple votes for the same nominee. By all means campaign to get the whole of RL behind Sinfield, but the "buy Kev a pint" thing was a farce, and the SPOTY organisers would have been within their rights IMO to withdraw him from the shortlist if they suspected something like that was going on.

It's been done previously as has been referred to in this thread, where the BBC suspected voting fraud going on to get Bob Nudd as the winner so disqualified him from the process.