I’m Danny’s biggest fan but I would NOT take him to Japan
Danny Cipriani winning a couple of awards won’t make Eddie Jones select him, and despite being a huge supporter of the fly-half for more than a decade, I wouldn’t take him to the World Cup in Japan either.
This week Cipriani became only the second player to win Premiership Player of the year and the RPa Players’ Player of the year in the same season.
Today he faces his main rival for the England no 10 shirt, Owen Farrell.
People should watch Saracens-Gloucester closely, then make their judgment. Saracens are like an international side, a completely different prospect. Gloucester and Cipriani will be suffocated.
There is pressure on Cipriani with the press he is getting — but you don’t pick players because they have won awards.
at the very top level, Farrell is in a different class. Cipriani has done brilliantly with Gloucester but the Premiership is not the pressure cooker of a World Cup.
Two questions surround his selection for England: does he start when everyone is fit? and can he be trusted to fit into the squad? Today, both answers are no.
I go back a long way with Cipriani, having first seen him play aged 13 at the Oratory School in the same team as my son Joe.
I have always loved the maverick in him and have consistently backed him over the years in these pages and on television.
He should have been the heir to Jonny Wilkinson, but is now 31 and has still only played 16 times for England. If I had coached England this decade, he would have been captain, and maybe won 100 caps by now.
Brian ashton let him down first. Cipriani cites him as one of the few who really understood him, but ashton was the first England coach to drop him after he was caught at a nightclub in 2008 before the Six nations game against Scotland — a massive over-reaction.
Cipriani, then 20, never recovered. The die was cast.
Since then, neither Martin Johnson nor Stuart Lancaster liked or picked him, and now we’ve got Eddie Jones.
I’ve criticised them all for not picking Cipriani, as it said far more about them than it did about him.
In 2010 I received a call from my friend Rod Macqueen, the coach who won the World Cup with australia in 1999.
He was becoming the coach of the new Melbourne Rebels team in Super Rugby and wanted my honest views on Cipriani.
I gave a glowing reference and said he’d be brilliant — he just needed strong people around him. Macqueen signed him.
Cipriani caused him no end of trouble with off-field incidents. When I next saw Macqueen, at the 2011 World Cup in new Zealand, he eyeballed me and said, ‘Thanks a lot, mate’ — he thought I’d stitched him up.
I felt bad but I hadn’t stitched up Macqueen, and despite all this off-field nonsense I continued to push his England cause. But after last year’s pre- season incident with Gloucester, everything changed.
What happened in Jersey in august — when he was arrested and subsequently fined — was a line in the sand. I felt let down, having been such a supporter over the years. He pleaded guilty to common assault, having bruised a policewoman, and now has a criminal record.
That’s not somebody I want in my team.
Farrell and George Ford are the best England 10s by a long way. In the third slot, do you want a player you’ve never really tried, and — demonstrated by the incident in Jersey — someone you can’t trust? England have the players, the team and the coach to win the World Cup this autumn — you cannot risk messing up in Japan by picking one player who you cannot trust on or off the pitch.