A majority of old players I have spoken to only laugh. To us old breed, the Danny and Josh front-page story concerning their brief and one-sided training-ground spat is funny. “Nothing to it, it happened in my day, in fact it happened all the time.” And so it did, but that is not to say there was nothing to it in this headline instance.

Plenty can be extracted from the incident in which Josh Lewsey is reported to have laid out Danny Cipriani.

First of all, it magnifies the state of tension prevailing at Wasps right now. Shaun Edwards, the club’s head coach, was right to assert that the sport is substantially a case of emotions. Wasps and Edwards have proved themselves the masters at pushing the emotional side of the game to the limit while managing to maintain the poise and composure of champions.

But Wasps are not Leicester, for whom a week without a scrap on the training pitch is considered a dull week and a nagging worry leading into a game. Austin Healey, a former Tiger, had the lip and legend has it that it was often enough split, when Austin wasn’t having a pop at Pat Howard or whoever was the object of his derision. In a regular nine-to-five world this behaviour is anarchy, but rugby union is both abnormal and violent.

The Tigers spent the best part of a decade fighting internally while cheerfully and often brilliantly uniting come the weekend to beat the lives out of their opponents. But the Tigers and Wasps are different animals.

Leicester was very much the traditional school of rugby whereas Wasps have been at the cutting edge of the English club game. With so many high-profile players and their entourage of agents, the sniff of a story at Wasps leaks quicker than anywhere else. Arguments and tension, yes, but physical violence; if it has happened before at Wasps, this is the first time it has reached the eyes and ears of the media.

So let us assume this is not the commonplace event at Wasps that it has been at Leicester (and my old club Bath in the days when they were monopolising English trophies). If it is exceptional it has to have some significance.

Let us begin with the involved parties and what we believe we know. Lewsey, a desperately determined but out-of-form World Cup winner, is an extremely frustrated man. He is also a proud man who, when on his game, has a habit of shouting the odds at teammates if they make errors. After his unusual start to a season, he is, during matches, almost certainly frustrated by his inability to find that elusive touch, left with only himself to shout at – but on a training field others can cop his frustration.

He might have lost confidence beneath the high ball but he still makes a tackle with typically resounding thunder. When Cipriani, with his penchant for letting others do this decidedly dirty work, misses a few in training, Lewsey lets him know that missing tackles is not the foundation upon which Wasps built the citadel from which they have twice conquered Europe. That would be my distant take on Lewsey’s involvement and his eventual headline punch.

What about Cipriani? It tells plenty about the youngster. Lewsey might have a World Cup winners’ medal but nothing fazes the fly-half. He is not one for backing down, even against such a bruising and intimidating presence as Lewsey.

Cipriani backs himself. That is probably what it most says about him, that and the fact that his jaw might be made of glass (which might well interest the odd opposing flanker). After securing just one win in their opening six games of the season, it tells us that Wasps are on the edge of falling over that emotional precipice on which they have tiptoed so magnificently over the years. It tells us that rugby is, as Edwards proclaimed, an emotional game.

But that is not all. The headline billing is a reminder that celebrity stories trump all else, an obsession before and perhaps a diversion since our fearful economic panic. The truth is that the face that belongs on the front page should belong to Kelly Brook. Cipriani is her paramour first and an England international second, or so the demands of our tabloid media would have it.

Never mind the incredible speed of his recovery from injury; he was dating a beautiful, famous actress and model. That and not the fame of Lewsey or Cipriani is the reason you are reading this right now. Other than the internal problems at Wasps and the personalities of the men involved, it reveals a tale that is no different from a hundred years of training-ground punch-ups.

We love conflict more than harmony. Think back to the successful 1997 British & Irish Lions tour to South Africa, where only a few media members spent time watching the Lions training drills. One day it emerged that Mark Regan and Barry

Williams, two of the squad’s hookers, had come to blows in training; then you couldn’t see the grass for press men, especially when it happened on an international tour or, this week, even better, involved a rugby player/celebrity.

There is no lesson Cipriani – or Lewsey for that matter – should learn. The fly-half has to strut and dominate those around him. It is part of his positional requirements; Lewsey should not make a habit of flooring teammates but hell, it shows that, metaphorically, the man is bleeding.

I mentioned the regularity of flare-ups in training at Bath but I am not going to give the names or stories because they came from a time when privacy had its place. In this celebrity-mad world this has been forgotten, and that is the saddest lesson to come from the story of when Josh floored Danny.