Jarrod Sharman crosses the line for the Hawks first try on Saturday. Jacob Lucas’s kicking game was on fire for the whole match. There are NRL players who can’t master the torpedo bomb. Lucas is a master of the dark art and it requires years of training.
The Harden-Murrumburrah Hawks have ended years of near-misses and claimed the 2026 George Tooke Shield, defeating the North Canberra Bears in the grand final on Saturday. The win gives the club its third premiership since joining the competition in 2009 and closes a chapter marked by persistence as much as talent. With a massive home crowd cheering both the Hawks and Hawkettes on, what a day it was for the club to take out both matches.
For a club that has lived so much of its modern history on the edge of glory, Saturday’s result carried extra weight. Harden first entered the George Tooke Shield in 2009 and immediately announced itself by winning the title. A second flag followed in 2017. Between those triumphs, and after them, the Hawks kept returning to September’s biggest stage only to fall short. They were runners-up in 2010, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2024 and 2025. Six grand-final losses in 17 seasons is a record that can wear a club down. This year it did not.
The 2026 campaign had the look of unfinished business from the opening rounds. Harden sat at the top of the ladder through the home-and-away season, compiling a formidable points differential and an unbeaten record across the regular fixtures that were publicly recorded. North Canberra finished second and remained the most consistent threat in the competition. The two clubs have circled each other for a decade. The Bears won the Shield in 2016 and 2019; Harden answered in 2017. Their meetings have rarely been straightforward. A grand final between them felt inevitable once both sides survived the earlier weeks of the finals series.
That recent history mattered. In 2024 Bungendore beat Harden 30–10. In 2025 the Tigers won again, 18–16, in another tight September contest. Those results left the Hawks with a simple brief for 2026: stay healthy, stay consistent, and refuse to let another final slip.
The George Tooke Shield occupies a particular place in the Canberra region’s rugby league landscape. It is the second-tier men’s competition beneath the Canberra Raiders Cup, drawing clubs from the city and the surrounding New South Wales towns. Harden-Murrumburrah sits in that country belt, a community club whose colours and home ground at McLean Oval have become familiar to anyone who follows the Shield. The Hawks’ presence since 2009 has been one of the competition’s more reliable storylines: competitive most years, dangerous in September, and never far from the conversation about who might lift the trophy.
North Canberra’s path to the grand final was equally earned. The Bears have three Shield titles of their own and a habit of peaking when the weather turns cold. Their 2026 side was again among the competition’s highest-scoring outfits during the regular season. A grand final against Harden was a fitting reward for both clubs and a reminder that the Shield’s best games often come when two well-drilled, well-known sides meet with everything on the line.
For Harden the victory is more than a line in the record books. It converts two recent heartbreaks into context rather than a curse. Players who lined up in those losses to Bungendore now have a premiership medal. Younger members of the squad have a first taste of what the club’s older heads have been chasing. Officials and volunteers who keep a country league club running through long winters have a result that justifies the hours.
Hawks Coach Nick Hall was very proud of his team and spoke to the Times after a weekend full of celebrations was had.
“It is a pretty amazing effort for a club, a small town and a small club like that to punch above their weight and be involved in semis, then grand finals and then be undefeated in two grades. That’s just amazing.”
The Harden Hawks have had many grand final chances but this year they were able to take out the premiership alongside the Hawkettes who secured their fifth consecutive premiership win.
“I’m blown away and the fact that we’ve done that is amazing. I think the girls have almost got to be the best performed team in the last 10 years in bush rugby league.
“For us, the boys, it’s just you don’t always get what you work for and I think we had chances to win comps in the previous years, but they’re not easy to win.
“We took our licks and we kept at it and I think that it’s great because you don’t always get it, so I was a very relieved man on Saturday afternoon.
With Nick taking a well earned break from the coaching role in 2027, he had mixed feelings at the end of this season.
“I feel great and bad about it at the same time. It is a lot, I need a little bit of a break personally, physically, family, all those things, so I need the break, but I feel like I hate to leave them now after that, it just doesn’t quite seem right, but I’ve made the commitment.
I won’t say I’ll never be back. I have loved my time there and who knows where we go.
“I think the game was a good reflection of our year, we were up against a very good side. I also think North Canberra, the opposition, played very well. I think they had things they could have done better, but they played discipline.
They completed with the ball and they didn’t give too many penalties and that’s probably been their achilles heel all year. I thought they optimised sort of some of their risk factors and made it hard for us, where in previous games, their discipline around penalties and errors made our job a little bit easier for the Hawks.
“It wasn’t an easy task, but I thought we could just consistently squeeze them, scored, squeeze them, scored, and gave them nothing. 20 to 6 is a pretty good reflection. I think their only chances came from a few mistakes and missed tackles we’ve made. The weather probably may have helped us a little bit.
“I think they gave chances and they’d be regretting those, but you need a little bit of luck and maybe we got a few, but we defended our mistakes and the errors we made. We dropped a few balls, a couple of kicks in the 2nd half, two or three, which means that was their chance and then we defended those mistakes. We were really good in those areas.
“I think everyone sees how brave we were defensively and then we were tenacious and that’s why we were undefeated and that’s why we won the comp.
The numbers since 2009 now read three premierships and six runners-up finishes. That is a demanding ledger. It also describes a club that has belonged at the sharp end of the competition for the better part of two decades. Winning in 2026 does not erase the losses. It does, however, complete the set the Hawks have been building toward since they first arrived in the Shield.
Captain Jaydo Cutting spoke after the match, “I’d like to thank the Club, our Sponsors, Hally for Tuesdays and Thursdays who does the work behind the scenes and everyone else. We’ve been the top two teams all year, that was warranted that grand final. It was always going to be a tough battle and it was hot out there but we stayed right up till the end. So let’s party!”
Attention will soon turn to 2027 and the task of defending the title. Rivals will study how Harden closed out this season. The Bears will want another chance. Bungendore, Crookwell and the rest of the pack will reset. For a few days at least, the story belongs to Harden. A club that has spent so long almost there finally got there again.
The George Tooke Shield has a new name on it. After 2009 and 2017, the Hawks have 2026. In a competition that rarely hands out easy rewards, that is a result worth savouring.
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