“I'm too sexy for my shirt, Too sexy for my shirt, So sexy it hurts” - Right Said Fred

Danny Cipriani received a right hook to the mouth from Josh Lewsey this week for the crime of being too sexy for his shirt. Training-ground bust-ups are not unusual and they happen in most sports, not only rugby union. It is instructive that Cipriani's fat lip has caught our attention.

There are many brief and quickly forgotten antler-clashing spats between rugby's cauliflower ear brigade. We are happy for rugby to keep these matters in-house. They don't interest us. What intrigues us here is that Cipriani, a player of incipient brilliance, with vast talent and vaster self-confidence, has fallen foul of his sport.

His indigestible nature has made him a target for the fists of his own side. There is a feeling that there is something inherently wrong about Cipriani. Lawrence Dallaglio, his former team-mate at London Wasps, said: “Danny ...will probably walk into the dressing-room a little more humble in the morning and that is no bad thing.”

Very rugby, eh? Can you imagine Sir Alex Ferguson wanting Cristiano Ronaldo to be a bit more humble? Few people in football - few people in the world - are as too-sexy as Ronaldo, but football has a long tradition of tolerating self-obsessed brilliance. It is recognised that Ronaldo's view of himself as the greatest human being ever to walk on the surface of the earth is helpful to Manchester United, rather than the reverse. You need at least 42 goals a season to make this point, but Ronaldo managed it. His team-mates sank their resentments and laid off the right hooks; and United won the Champions League.

Cricket has always been full of players who see themselves as different from the common run. David Gower, a head full of golden curls, swatted his first ball in Test cricket for four with that extraordinary flick-pull shot that only he could play. He was insufferably brilliant.

Certainly, he drove plenty of people mad. Graham Gooch, when England captain, finally got rid of him, but this is generally regarded as the greatest error of his career. Gooch's flaw was a certain narrowness of vision. He was a bit too rugby to be a great captain. He lacked the gift for inclusivity.

Cricket requires a biodiversity of talents and in consequence a wide range of psychological types. In cricket the peacocks must march with the ravens. Many cricketers find their motivation by standing ever so slightly apart from the team that includes them.

Modern cricketers are keen to put a corporate face on it these days, claiming that they are all super-fit, hyper-dedicated professionals and that you can hardly tell one from another, so united are they in the huddle. But the England team include the complex neurotic, Stephen Harmison, and the non-fielding, non-batting Monty Panesar, and are led by Kevin Pietersen, the peacock's peacock. If Pietersen were playing for Wasps, he'd be in treble figures for right hooks.

Perhaps rugby union requires more uniformity than other sports. Perhaps there is less scope for individuality. But no. Take rowing. In this sport a crew of individuals seeks to become not a team but a machine, each part working in savage connection with all the others.

This would seem to be the most Roundheaded of sports, the one in which no atom of individuality can be tolerated. But it produces people of almost suffocatingly strong personality, such as Sir Steve Redgrave and Sir Matthew Pinsent, and deals effortlessly with flamboyant, not to say foppish individuals who, despite carefully cultivated good looks, somehow escape the right hooks and win things. Oarsmen such as Andrew Triggs Hodge this year and Tim Foster eight years ago. Too sexy for their rowing vests they may be, but not too sexy for gold medals.

All of which asks questions about the “no show-offs” clause that seems to be written into rugby union. In this sport the stars are stars almost despite themselves. Jonny Wilkinson, the biggest star English rugby has known, prides himself on his lack of pride. He is a tackle-junkie. As a fly half he always believed that his best work was done from the bottom of a ruck. Wilkinson is more forward-like than the forwards, taking on the kicking almost with reluctance, not because he wants the limelight but because someone has to do it and he is never going to shirk anything in his life.

Jason Robinson, also a colossal player in that epic World Cup-winning campaign of 2003, was almost pathological in his desire to play down his individual brilliance.

Does rugby union have no room for individual flamboyance? Is the corporate ethic the only way to win things in this sport? Lift your eyes from the England team for a moment and you see at once that this is far from the case. Once you leave England the sport is full of stars, full of men who love to stand out from the rest, full of players who are too sexy for their shirts.

Let's start with the entire France team. No matter who is playing. A few years ago they did the most extraordinary photo shoot, which produced a series of broody, narcissistic, homoerotic images of naked men. Each player commented knowledgably on his image: “I hoped it would bring out my feminine side.” Hard to imagine an England tight five in the same circumstances.

The France team have always been full of mavericks, semi-geniuses in designer stubble, flamboyant attention-seekers. Jean-Pierre Rives would have been a right-hook magnet if he had played for, rather than against, England. At their best, the France team have run on Peacock Power.

But rugby finds stars in many other nations. The Australians gave us David Campese, whose pre-match routine was to muck about by himself while the other 14 did their team bonding. Even the All Blacks, who pride themselves on their facelessness, not only produced Dan Carter but also cherish him.

You don't even have to leave Britain to find a culture of individuality in rugby union. Gavin Henson has been too sexy for his Wales shirt since he discovered hair gel and if we go back into the mists of time we find the great Gerald Davies, rugby writer of this parish. Oh, Gerald has always said all the right things about team ethics and so forth, but he cultivated - and still possesses - his trademark Cad's Moustache and his principal contribution was never workrate and tackle-count but dazzling and drastic interventions at warp speed.

It is clear, then, that English rugby union is uniquely possessed of anti-star culture. The English game is based on the comfortable certainty that anyone who is a bit different will at some stage receive a right hook. Cipriani may be a humbler man as a result, but do we want him to be humbler? Do we want him at the bottom of a ruck, one of the lads, or do we want him reinventing the game and carving the opposition to shreds?

Is it really the case that we'd sooner lose like Englishmen than win like foreigners?