Cups galore but there’s room for one more

FOR decade after decade, the old fogies responsible for running the world’s oldest annual international sporting event steadfastly refused to recognise it as a competition. In their unflinching protection of the Corinthian spirit, such a word smacked of professionalism.

Officially, they never published a table, let alone dared refer to it as a championship. “The official position is that it’s a series of individual matches, not a championship,’’ Ray Williams, then secretary of the Welsh Rugby Union, once told me. “So your idea of a trophy can’t happen.’’

Ray Williams, the sport’s first full-time coaching organiser who did so much to spread the gospel near and far, was one of the more enlightened figures, a man ahead of his time. When it came to minting a trophy, he would have been whistling in the wind.

It took the best part of another 20 years for the home countries and France to agree to a radical change and commission a silversmith to knock up a trophy. Now, as if in some futile attempt to make up for lost time, they have them coming out of their ears.

There is a bauble for just about every match: the Millennium Trophy (England-Ireland), the Centenary Quaich (Ireland-Scotland), the Doddie Weir Cup (Wales-Scotland), the Freedom Cup (New Zealand-South Africa), the Hillary Shield (England-New Zealand) and the James Bevan Trophy (Australia-Wales) to name but a few.

There is also the Admiral Brown Cup, in memory of William Brown from Co. Mayo who emigrated to the US, thereby putting their then nine-year-old son on his way towards creating the Argentinian Navy. The pot in his memory is up for grabs whenever Ireland are obliged to slug it out with the Pumas.

Strangely, Wales-France seems to be out on a limb as the only major fixture offering the victor a bit more than a hefty win bonus. They could always name the trophy in honour of Welsh veterans of WW2 whom the French have recognised for their valour.

One name springs to mind, that of Brindley Llewellyn Waters, a D-Day tank gunner mechanic who survived the war despite being seriously wounded in action near the Belgian border. The French Government presented the former Welsh Guardsman with the Legion d’honneur three years ago for his part in the Liberation of France. Brin Waters died in Magor in December 2020 age 98.