![]() And that’s not a question of skill so much as it is of belief. France had their chances, so did England and so did New Zealand, but not the nerve, or accuracy, they needed to take advantage of them. Whether it was Eben Etzebeth bulling through three French tacklers to the tryline, Handré Pollard nailing that 77th‑minute penalty shot at goal or De Klerk making that tap-tackle on Dalton Papali’i as he raced down the wing into the wide open acres of the Springboks’ 22. Handré Pollard kicks the crucial penalty against England. South Africa’s back‑to‑back victories were both away from home and in this one, the second of them, they had to get past three of the finest sides who have played the game, including the hosts who had 80,000 fans behind them. It almost feels like rugby heresy to say it, but what he and his team have done in the past five years stands comparison with what McCaw’s All Blacks did in 2011 when McCaw, playing on one broken foot, steered his team through the knockout rounds, and 2015, when they played untouchable rugby. Kolisi is right alongside McCaw now, packing down on the other side of the back row. Well, from now on no one will ever be able to tell the story of the Rugby World Cup without also telling the one of Siya Kolisi, the township kid who grew up to be Springbok captain. As it got bigger, so did the achievement of winning it: John Eales, Martin Johnson, John Smit, and of course the peerless Richie McCaw, the man many reckoned was the best of them all. Only a handful ever get to pick it up: David Kirk, Nick Farr-Jones, Francois Pienaar – their reputations grew with the tournament. ![]() The value of the trophy isn’t in the silver and gold it’s made out of, though that must have gone up in the years since, but what it represents to the men who play for it. 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. It was funny to watch the thing be treated with such reverence, as if it were a holy artefact. 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. There was a scramble to move it on to a plinth in the seconds before the teams came on to the pitch. “Get it,” Shehadie said.Īt the Stade de France on Saturday night the trophy was there in a locked box on the sidelines in front of the players’ tunnel. It was silver, plated in gold, and cost £6,000. 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. “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. The old Wallaby prop Nicholas Shehadie got a call one morning from his co‑chair, John Kendall-Carpenter. 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.
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