An Irishman’s Diary about Sonny Bill Williams, the kid with the medal, and Roald Dahl

Like everybody else, I was at first charmed by that incident after the Rugby World Cup final in which All Blacks centre Sonny Bill Williams gave his medal to a 14-year-old pitch invader who’d been “smoked” (the player’s word) by a security man.

I was doubly charmed to learn that the waif-like teenager’s first name was “Charlie” which, even if his surname wasn’t “Bucket”, elevated the episode into the realms of a Roald Dahl story.

But then my inner begrudger went to work. It pointed out that, even before he acquired the medal, the kid was hardly underprivileged. He was at the Rugby World Cup final, after all.

Not only that, he was there with several members of his family – this at a game where tickets, assuming you could get them at face value, cost up to £715. Unless they’d won theirs in a chocolate bar, any resemblance with the Buckets must have been minimal.

Then it emerged that Charlie was a pupil at Somerset’s ultra-prestigious Millfield School, where the £31,000 yearly fees make Clongowes Wood look like one those places where pupils used to contribute by bringing sods of turf.

Along with Eton, Millfield is a member of the “G20” – a global group of elite educational establishments, none of them in Ireland.

“Old Millfieldians” include a plethora of Arabian princes, a brother of Osama bin Laden, and the current English rugby captain, Chris Robshaw (they also include, in fairness, Gareth Edwards, the great Welsh scrum-half and son of a miner, who got in on a scholarship).

None of which was young Charlie’s fault, of course. But it did lend a different light to his act of rebellion in running onto the pitch.

If he’d been a character in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, Dahl would surely have designated him as one of the bold children, like Augustus Gloop and Violet Beauregarde, who were punished with various mishaps from which they had to be extricated painfully by the Oompa Loompas.

As for Sonny Bill, as well as being the Willy Wonka of the World Cup final, he may also have been its nearest thing to Charlie Bucket.

Sure, he’s a 30-year-old man now, and built like a brick outdoor bathroom. But he grew up poor, in social housing, and what drove him to succeed in professional rugby was an ambition to buy his mother her own place.

He’s a big man in more ways than one, clearly. And I’m glad he gave his medal away, all things considered. But I’m also glad the organisers found him a replacement.

Spare a thought, meanwhile, for the unfortunate security man, who was widely derided for his tackle, although he probably thought he was just doing is job.

If he’s feeling bad about it now, I suggest he console himself with endless replays of another recent rugby collision – the one involving London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, during a trade mission to Japan.

Johnson is not as tall as Sonny Bill, but he’s wider. So while playing a fun-rugby game with Tokyo children, he might have been expected to exercise restraint.

Instead of which, he took a shortcut through 10-year-old Toki Sekiguchi, who had to be dug out of the Astroturf afterwards.

Judged by the Sonny Bill scale of generosity, the mayor should have compensated his victim with, say, the freedom of London, a scholarship to any G20 school of his choice, and the lifetime of counselling the child may now need. But what did he in fact give him (apart from whiplash)? A rugby ball.

Getting back to Roald Dahl, however, I have to admit having had him on the brain even before the Twickenham incident. This is because, during the same World Cup tournament, I spent three weekends in Cardiff, the city of his birth, where places associated with him are everywhere.

The most interesting, probably, is a former sweet shop in Llandaff, which was the scene of a very bold thing Dahl and his friends once did.

He was only eight at the time, but had a grudge against the shopowners – a pair of witch-like sisters he later conflated into a fictional “Mrs Pratchett”.

So with five fellow conspirators, one day, he took revenge by planting a dead mouse in a gob-stopper jar.

The “Great Mouse Plot of 1923” (or in some versions 1924) is these days immortalised by a blue plaque on the shop, now a Chinese takeaway. Alas for Dahl and his friends, appreciation was far from immediate. According to his own account, their interim reward was a caning.

@FrankmcnallyIT