At the time it was merely the final game of 2025, an NRL season in which he had played every one of the Rabbitohs’ 25 matches. As most of South Sydney’s star players had sat injured, Arrow had led a ragtag band of young players through the year, giving so much he’d often end games in tears. Arrow was crying again on Friday night.
But so was everyone else. He led the Rabbitohs out one last time in the final round of the 2026 season. This time he couldn’t run, so he walked.
And he couldn’t talk either, so he laughed and cried, two human reflexes he says are interchangeable as his motor neurone disease takes ever greater hold. More than 40,000 people at Allianz Stadium were on their feet singing Stand By Me when Arrow emerged leading a melancholy troop of teammates as captain in his 100th game for South Sydney. Flanking his slow advance was a cardinal and myrtle corridor made up of club legends and former teammates flown in especially.
The NRL had changed its interchange rules to allow Arrow his centenary match. So the man stood, head bowed, in the centre, soaking it all up as You’ll Never Walk Alone, a song now synonymous with Arrow’s battle with the insidious disease, rang out: When you walk through a storm / hold your head up high / and don’t be afraid of the dark. For Rabbitohs and Roosters fans this is usually the game of the year, a final round face-off where 118 years of blood feuding bubbles up and blisters for 80 minutes.
For starters, it was a Rabbitohs home game at the Roosters’ home ground, the beginning of a shared tenancy of Allianz Stadium commencing in 2027. But mainly because, for those familiar with Arrow across his 10 years in the NRL, football has felt a little empty this year. He showed up at training on the first day of summer as his lovable larrikin self.
On the first day of autumn, he was front and centre for the team photo, still a bit sore but ready to rumble for another season. Given his heroics in 2025, a campaign of courage that won him South Sydney’s best and fairest, and also the Souths Cares award for his charity work, no one batted an eye when Arrow didn’t run out in round one. He was still at training every day and most nights he still doled out soup for the homeless from the Vinnies food vans.
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