It was just a couple of months before the very first men’s Rugby World Cup that the organising committee realised no one had a trophy to give the winner. The old Wallaby prop Nicholas Shehadie got a call one morning from his co‑chair, John Kendall-Carpenter. “Son,” Shehadie remembered Kendall-Carpenter saying over the phone, “we’ve got a problem.” Kendall-Carpenter found one in the vault at Garrard at Regent Street. It was 15 inches tall, had a nymph on one side, a satyr on the other and, for reasons that made more sense when it was made back in 1906, a pineapple on top. It was silver, plated in gold, and cost £6,000. “Get it,” Shehadie said.
At the Stade de France on Saturday night the trophy was there in a locked box on the sidelines in front of the players’ tunnel. There was a scramble to move it on to a plinth in the seconds before the teams came on to the pitch. A man was barking instructions to two women, who both had to put on clean white gloves just to lift it and shift it a metre. It was funny to watch the thing be treated with such reverence, as if it were a holy artefact. Last time I saw the trophy, Faf de Klerk was drinking lager out of it wearing nothing but a baseball cap and a pair of underpants.
