It is Thursday afternoon, four days before Easter, and Wasps’ training ground
at Acton in west London feels like the West End. Women hang bunting from the
ceiling – one of their number is having a party; James Haskell breezes into
reception, stopping and talking; Josh Lewsey looks out at the rain and the
muck of the practice pitches and says it was the facilities that made him
sign on for one more year.
Visitors glance furtively over the shoulders of those to whom they speak,
trying to catch a glimpse of him. For on this Holy Thursday, he is the new
messiah. Dressed in black tracksuit bottoms and a Wasps top, Danny Cipriani
is in the weights room, sitting before a television camera, and trying not
to think too much about the life he once had.
Anne, his mum, has been talking to him about the dangers that come with the
attention. His Wasps and England teammates have tried to prepare him: what
will you say when asked this? He is 20 years of age, for crying out loud,
and he’s already been an unwitting star in the lurid games played on the
pages of the News of the World, been dropped from the England team after
being photographed coming out of a nightclub and, on his immediate
reinstatement to the team, he quietly reminded us he is the most exciting
young talent in world rugby.
But who is Danny Cipriani? Television done, he comes with his lunch in one
hand, a warm handshake in the other, leads us to a small office upstairs and
before the tape recorder has warmed, he is talking about the dangers of
judging people you don’t know. “People come from different places, different
circumstances,” he says, “and the problem you see now might go back to one
moment in their past that no one else thought important.”
Two minutes into this meeting, you feel the only place that Cipriani is truly
20 is on his birth certificate. He has the physique of a seasoned athlete
and the mind of a player eight or 10 years older than he is. In no time, you
are forgetting much that you had imagined.
So arrogant in his teenage years, he would sometimes do his own warm-ups,
separate from the team.
“I read that and it was news to me. I never, ever used to do my own warm-ups.
I was always part of the team warm-up. It is interesting the way people like
to portray you. It was also written that I wouldn’t pass to teammates I
didn’t rate. Neither did I recognise that when I read it.”
Once he chose to convert a try with a drop-kick from the touchline to help
Rosslyn Park beat Richmond 7-5 in an under14s final.
“The match did take place, we did win, and I did kick a touchline conversion,
but I placed it and kicked it the normal way. Another newspaper said I led
the singing of the national anthem when playing for Rosslyn Park Under14s in
a tour match against Brive. I read this and rang one of my old teammates,
‘Am I completely losing my memory or something?’ ” He
now lives with his mum in her £1m house in Raynes Park.
“If anyone is prepared to pay that amount for the house, I will happily put
them in touch with my mum.”
For a couple of months, he dated Monica Irimia from the Romanian pop duo
The Cheeky Girls.
“I had one picture taken with her, that was it. I never, ever went out with
her. In the media, things are made up all the time and you have to deal with
that. In a way, it is upsetting. You read things written about you and you
think you’ve got to change how you behave, but you’re not like how you’re
being portrayed. You just have to be yourself.” SO LET us start again.
He was born in November 1987, the son of Jay Cipriani and his partner Anne.
Not long afterwards, his parents separated. Trinidadian Jay lived in
Shepherds Bush, home for Anne and Danny was the Lockyer council estate in
Putney. His mum has been a remarkable influence in his life, working as a
black cab driver to earn the money to send him to private schools; Donhead
in Wimbledon, the Oratory School in Reading and Whitgift in Croydon.
Anne earned extra money by working extraordinarily long hours and Danny’s
memory is of his mum being gone early in the morning, sometimes even before
he got up, then being back in the late afternoon to prepare their evening
meal before again disappearing into the London night. She wanted her only
son to be a doctor and when school reports said he should be doing better,
she asked him why she was killing herself driving a cab.
“Mum was right, she didn’t deserve to read a poor school report about me and I
would think, ‘I’ve got to sort this out’, and I would. I got the balance
between study and sport right until I was about 16, but in sixth form,
preparing for A-levels, rugby did begin to affect things.” In his GCSEs, he
got an A*, two As, five Bs and one C and, without rugby, there would have
been a good university.
Through the early years, he visited Jay in Shepherd’s Bush on Sundays and
enjoyed spending time with him, their shared love of sport helping to form a
strong bond. When he was nine, Jay returned to his native Trinidad. “There
are different ways you think about something like that. At the time, I found
it hard to understand why he wanted to go. Obviously, he had his reasons.
For a time, it felt like I had lost my dad but each summer I would spend
four weeks in Trinidad, seeing him, visiting all my aunties and uncles,
millions of cousins, and I love my Trinidad family to bits.
“Dad’s return to Trinidad brought my mum and I closer, made us even tighter.
Because she looked after me so well, I was able to move on and get used to
life without my dad in England.”
Cipriani was always good at sport and played football, cricket and rugby to a
high standard. His three years boarding at the Oratory School gave him the
opportunity to play endlessly and soon there were choices: he could have
joined the academy at Reading football club, might have joined the Surrey
cricket academy, but he chose instead to go with the game at which he
excelled: rugby. At the age of 17, before beginning his second year of sixth
form at Whitgift, he signed a professional contract with Wasps. How much?
“It was more than £15,000, less than £25,000,” he says, smiling.
They must have been exciting times; a secondary school pupil, earning as much
as his teachers, ducking away to training, getting a taste of the life he
craved. “Warren Gatland was the coach who signed me and I’d be at team
analysis meetings listening while he told Simon Shaw he hadn’t performed the
previous Saturday, told Josh Lewsey he wasn’t playing well. These players
were giants in my eyes but it was made clear if they didn’t play better in
the next game, they would be dropped. It was a massive eye-opener for me.”
If it opened his eyes, it also distracted his focus. How could A-levels
compare with the challenge of convincing Lawrence Dallaglio that he, the
schoolboy, was up to it? It was like a seesaw; as the rugby player rose, so
the scholar slumped. “I would pinch myself on the training ground and wonder
was it really happening. At the same time I tried to seem cool and would
make jokes with Paul Sackey, Alex King and Stuart Abbott. I couldn’t be seen
to be in awe of anyone because then I wouldn’t develop. My mentality was to
train as well as anyone. If I’ve got anything from my mum, it’s her
determination.”
Anne told him Dallaglio was her favourite player, and he told her he wasn’t
sure Shaun Edwards thought much of him. “When I started, I felt Shaun didn’t
like me. He used to get on my back a lot and I would try to prove him wrong.
He was helping me to become mentally stronger and has always been a father
figure to me. Shaun analyses every game because he wants to learn more and
more.
“He says that while he had talent as a player, he wasn’t the most talented. He
became a great game-player because he was a dedicated student of the game
and he knew where the gaps were. That dedication, that’s what I want to take
from Shaun. Although I have to say it felt a bit weird sending him a text
congratulating him on Wales’s Grand Slam win.”
There is one thing that has been written and is true; he is seriously quick.
He works with the sprint coach Margot Wells, wife of the 1980 Olympic 100m
gold medallist Allan, and his best time for 30 yards is 2.69 seconds,
quicker than former England wing Dan Luger, whose best time under Wells was
2.71 seconds. Paul Sackey complains that Cipriani is so confident about his
speed, he thinks he’s faster than Sackey himself.
“I can promise everyone I am quicker than Paul Sackey,” says Cipriani. “No
question about that. Margot is convinced of it and she’s trained Paul for
many years. Sorry Sacks, but you’ve just got to deal with this.” THERE is a
toughness about Cipriani you don’t expect in a 20-year-old. Perhaps it comes
from a childhood guilt about his mother driving to the ends of the earth on
his behalf, or from the emotional upheaval of his father’s return to
Trinidad. From wherever, it has helped him survive his first two brushes
with the thorns of celebrity.
He spent a night with a young model, Larissa Summers, who passed on the
details to the News of the World. The newspaper then reported that she had,
in fact, started life as Darren Pratt before having a sex change. It was the
kind of silly story that needed only a name to stop the passing
reader. Cipriani was the name. Did he find it humiliating?
“No, not at all. It was an honest mistake on my part. I still don’t know if
it’s true [that Larissa was once Darren] but I’m too hard-skinned for
something like that to affect me. I’ve spoken to so many people since who’ve
told me they did the same thing, except they knew the situation beforehand.
These are people everyone would know. That made me laugh.”
But mum, surely she didn’t laugh? “She was obviously upset and we spoke about
it. We are very strong, very close, and we move on. I hate to upset her in
any way. When I was excited and used the f-word in a television interview
immediately after the win against Ireland, the only thought in my head was,
‘Oh no, what’s my mum going to think?’ I also want to apologise to everyone
else for using that word on daytime television.”
And then there was the 15-minute, alcohol-free visit to the Mayfair nightclub
that temporarily cost him his place in the England team against Scotland.
His regard for England coach Brian Ashton comes through in much of what he
says and he lists Ashton with Gatland, Edwards and Ian McGeechan as the
coaches who have had most influence on his career. Yet he chooses his words
carefully about the nightclub controversy. “Brian came in for a lot of
criticism for dropping me from the team and some people might feel what he
did was harsh, but he was true to his word; I was left out for one game,
back in consideration for the next.
“When that photograph was taken I thought, ‘Oh, that could be in tomorrow’s
papers’, but I never thought it would cause any trouble. It’s taught me a
lesson. There’s a time and a place for everything, and perhaps on that
night, I wasn’t in the right place at the right time. Fair enough.”
In sport, as in life, it is not the knocks but the response that matters. A
little after nine o’clock on that Thursday morning he was called by
telephone and told of his expulsion from the team. By midday he was in
Guildford, immersed in a tortuous track session with Wells. His time for 60
yards that day, 5.48 seconds, was the quickest he has ever recorded.
SPEAKING with Dallaglio before meeting Cipriani, I asked if he liked the
young fly-half. “Yes I do,” said the Wasps captain. “I like him a lot.” Why?
“I have always found a lot of humility in Danny.” When Cipriani is told of
Dallaglio’s opinion, he pauses momentarily. “I imagine Lawrence sees me in
similar situations that he was in as a young player. He would say what was
on his mind, he would boss people on the pitch, and there would have been
times when people called him arrogant.
“On the field Lawrence sees me in one light, off the field he knows me as a
person and it doesn’t surprise me that he sees some humility.”
