No one quite knows how Daly Cherry-Evans will be received when he runs onto Brookvale Oval for the first time on Thursday night wearing a jersey other than Manly’s but there’s no doubt at least a portion of Sea Eagles fans will boo.
Few genuine champions of the game have a more complicated legacy. Cherry-Evans will always be a premiership halfback at Manly but there’s as many fans of the club who find him difficult to cop as there are who have genuine and pure love for him.
By rights, Cherry-Evans should be a God-tier figure at the Sea Eagles, putting him alongside the likes of Ken Arthurson, Bob Fulton, Graham Eadie, Paul Vautin, Geoff Toovey, Cliff Lyons, Steve Menzies, Jamie Lyon and the Stewart brothers. Des Hasler was on this list but his legacy is now every bit as complex as Cherry-Evans’.
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The gun halfback’s deeds on the field earned that level of reverence, leading the 2011 team to the premiership as a rookie before almost repeating the dose two years later when he won the Clive Churchill Medal for a performance that had Manly poised to win a third premiership in six years in 2013, only for the Roosters to turn things around in the last 20 minutes. He also captained Manly 206 times, a record, and played a record 352 first grade games for the club.
Daly Cherry-Evans celebrates victory after his 350th game for Manly in 2025. Getty
Yet there has always been a perception that when it came to contract time he put self-interest before loyalty for the club. It is difficult to separate fact from fiction but there are some stark events that painted the greed narrative against him.
Fact: Cherry-Evans put himself on the market at the first opportunity and signed a contract with the Titans in 2015, only to use it as leverage to sign what was then the most lucrative contract in rugby league history to stay at the Sea Eagles.
Fact: Cherry-Evans quit the Sea Eagles as a 36-year-old captain of the club when the door was open for him to finish his career on the northern beaches – whether or not an official deal had been tabled.
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Some of the other stories that have coloured the disloyalty narrative are murkier.
One example is that DCE was blamed in some circles for breaking up the 2011 premiership team by demanding a significant pay increase in his second year at the club. Anthony Watmough famously vented his spleen on the Hello Sport podcast in 2018, claiming the halfback had vowed in 2012 not to turn up to training until the club upgraded his deal. As Watmough tells it, then coach Geoff Toovey and the club caved to Cherry-Evans’ demands despite push-back from senior players who had taken less money than their market value for years in order to build a team that won two premierships and ultimately played in four grand finals between 2007-2013.
The season after the 2013 grand final was to be Glenn Stewart’s last at Brookvale, with the champion back-rower forced out the door due to a backended contract the Sea Eagles could no longer afford.
Watmough followed him through the exit the same year, and Kieran Foran was gone the year after. An undercurrent of resentment towards Cherry-Evans, the chosen one to lead the Sea Eagles into the next era, lingered.
Stewart, the 2011 Clive Churchill Medallist, wearing a Rabbitohs jersey in 2015 for the final 19 games of his NRL career is still considered a low point of that period.
A stinging Watmough interview lamenting the club’s loss of identity to explain his departure when he signed with the Eels was equally galling.
Manly Sea Eagles 2011 grand final team celebrates after being presented the premiership trophy. SMH
Cherry-Evans certainly wasn’t to blame for the club’s mismanagement of its senior players during that period but some of the mud that was slung stuck to him regardless.
More recently there has been persistent whispers that Cherry-Evans’ relationship with the Trobjevic brothers had fractured. That was put to new Manly captain Tom Trbojevic by a journalist on Monday and he claimed to be unaware of the rumour.
It’s unlikely that there’s any genuine feud between them but no one would claim they’re best mates either. The Trbojevic brothers are the closest thing to royalty on the northern beaches so any sense that Cherry-Evans isn’t close with them only fuels suspicion among Manly fans that he was dragging the club down.
Yet none of the Trbojevic boys v DCE sentiment would have even got to the surface had 2025 not played out the way it did.
By that point we were an entire decade clear of Stewart and Watmough’s exit from Manly and any feeling of bitterness about Cherry-Evans’ role in it had washed away.
He was the club’s superstar, its captain and a leader who had gained respect across the competition due to dozens of match-winning performances and representative heroics that included the captaincy of Queensland.
He became a more engaging media figure and led the Sea Eagles valiantly through some difficult periods, most notably the pride jersey fiasco that ultimately led to Hasler’s demise at the end of his second stint as coach during Cherry-Evans’ time at Manly.
Time had healed any of the wounds that were opened during his early years but they were ripped open again when he dropped a bombshell on Nine’s 100% Footy early last season.
He was quitting the club but couldn’t say if he was retiring and claimed he hadn’t signed elsewhere.
It didn’t take long for it to become clear that at the very least he had a gentleman’s agreement to join the Roosters – an agreement that went unconfirmed until November 7 but hijacked his final season with Manly, leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of fans.
The fact that the fans felt like they never got the full truth about Cherry-Evans’ exit – either from the player or the club – has only added to the anger that some of them will undoubtedly unleash on Thursday night.
It shouldn’t have come to this, but after the indignity of watching Stewart run onto Brookvale Oval in the myrtle and cardinal all those years ago, the Sea Eagles are about to endure a repeat in Roosters colours.
This time there’ll be no doubt about how much of a role Cherry-Evans played.