“I do feel our country is fucked,” Danny Cipriani says calmly on a murky, rainy morning in Tunbridge Wells. The former England rugby player has been talking about his tumultuous life and career, without bitterness or rancour, for almost two hours, and he seems happier than at any point in the 15 years we have known each other. His reflections on the state of England are striking as Cipriani is not trying to shock or insult anyone.
Instead, he explores a deeper malaise of conservatism, deceit and insularity which affects the country politically, culturally and in the struggles of English rugby. “Our culture and society is very rigid and it’s always trying to look like it’s doing the right thing,” Cipriani says. “But if you’re trying to look like you’re doing the right thing, you’ll never actually do the right thing, because it’s all an act. It has to come from a place of faith and purity, love and honesty.”
Those words might induce eye‑rolling among cynics who have never met Cipriani and only know about the past chaos of his personal life, which featured heavily in the tabloid press for years. But faith, purity, love and honesty are words he uses repeatedly while explaining how he has changed.
He will return to the death of his former girlfriend, Caroline Flack, who took her life amid hounding by the tabloids, to discuss how he freed himself of his demons. But Cipriani’s views on rugby, a sport he loves but which has been undermined by parochialism and fear, come first.
“Rugby reflects society and it is similar to the way this country is run politically, culturally and in the media. They’re all run by similar people who went to the same sort of schools and have the same narrow mindset. There’s a lack of diversity in ideas. There’s also a class hierarchy because most rugby people went to private school. I also did – but I had a very different upbringing.”
Cipriani grew up as a mixed-race boy on a Putney council estate in a single-parent family. His white mother drove a London black cab and worked so hard that she had neither the time nor the inclination to show Danny any lasting affection. He felt more at ease with his Trinidadian father and black culture. But his dad flitted in and out of his life without offering any continuity or solidity. Sport filled a chasm and Cipriani was extraordinarily gifted.
“Rugby has so many amazing qualities,” he says, “like camaraderie and teamwork. But it needs to allow people to be themselves. Christian Wade [his black former teammate, an electrifying wing, who won only one Test cap] would have been perfect. Pick him for England, let him play freely and talk naturally. He would have opened the game up to so many different people because he’s full of love and joy. But the sport tried to knock it out of him. That’s why he gave up rugby and went to the NFL for four years.”
Cipriani describes a club game when Wade played brilliantly, scoring a hat-trick for Wasps – but after the two friends did a little dance, the winger was humiliated by their coach. “Wadey stops celebrating after that,” Cipriani writes in his powerful and thoughtful new book. “Every time he scores, he just trots back. I think: ‘You’ve torn that kid’s heart out.’”
Apart from charting the dramatic highs and lows of Cipriani’s career, and showing how his mistakes were framed by the desire of English rugby to control his individuality, the book documents the reasons why the game is approaching a crisis. We talk before England, having lost five of their previous six matches, played with magnificent resolve to defeat Argentina 27-10 on Saturday. It was a backs‑against‑the‑wall performance built on immense forward play, gritty defence and the boot of George Ford, who kicked all England’s points. The fact that England played almost the entire game with 14 men, after Tom Curry was sent off, added to the victory. But Argentina were shockingly poor and England will need to find an adventurous spark when they face better opposition in the World Cup.
Reflecting on the game over the past 15 years, Cipriani suggests that “many players in England don’t enjoy rugby because the environment is based on fear”. That fear of difference, of doing “the wrong thing”, has produced a corrosive lack of imagination.
“We have lots of scrum coaches, lineout coaches, kicking coaches and defence coaches,” Cipriani says. “But when it comes to attack, it’s often stat-based. The general game‑understanding within English rugby, as in how to attack space, gets taken out of the players’ control. The coaches only speak about being physical, tough, aggressive, getting over the gain line. There’s no feel or emotional intelligence. Ireland don’t have the best players but they’ve got the best formation and framework. They’ve worked on that small decision‑making element and opened up their play.
“If we don’t start opening the doors to new ideas, English rugby will never move forward. It doesn’t mean that we can just come in and throw out crazy, frivolous ideas. But they describe anyone different in English rugby as a maverick. That’s wrong. I wasn’t a maverick. I was a decision maker.”
On his England starting debut, when he played with such authority and verve against Ireland at Twickenham in 2008, Cipriani ran the attack. He was only 20 but England’s head coach at the time, Brian Ashton, believed in Cipriani’s vision and courage. The young fly-half produced an astonishing performance but it was to the great misfortune of both Cipriani and English rugby that he was then sidelined by a serious injury and mistakes in his private life which fuelled the tabloid depiction of him as a perennial “bad boy”.
He eventually returned as a better player, replacing the loss of his searing pace with a game intelligence that won him multiple player-of-the-season awards. But Cipriani was never trusted by his England coaches after Ashton’s departure in April 2008. Ashton had been dismissed by England’s new team manager Martin Johnson who effectively took over the role of head coach, having never coached an international side or even at Premiership level.
Reflecting on that decision in his book, Cipriani writes: “Maybe the RFU are not very bright because, if they were, Johnno wouldn’t be anywhere near the England job … he’s never coached anyone.”
For Cipriani the nadir was reached when he believes the Twickenham hierarchy prevented him from playing for the British & Irish Lions in 2009. Ian McGeechan and Shaun Edwards, two coaches who trusted Cipriani after working with him at Wasps, called him up as a replacement for the Lions tour of South Africa. But they needed England to confirm his fitness. Cipriani played for England Saxons that summer but the RFU told the Lions he was not fit, and an apologetic McGeechan and Edwards could no longer select him.
“Johnno tells the media it was the Lions’ decision not to take me,” Cipriani writes in his book. “Technically, he’s right, but only because England told them I was unfit.”
Cipriani still feels betrayed by the decision to block his Lions selection. “That was devastating. But it would have looked poor on Martin Johnson and those people if I had done well for the Lions. But it’s a dishonest sport. There are lots of great qualities about English rugby but you’ve got to bring more honesty for it to flourish.”
Cipriani describes a landmark moment of honest revelation when he broke down in front of the Gloucester squad soon after Flack’s death in February 2020. They were no longer a couple, but he and Flack remained close and she drew comfort from the fact he had overcome the depression which had once driven him to the point where he considered taking his life. On the day she died, Flack called Cipriani. He was just about to play a game and so he texted to say he would phone her once the match was over. She never answered his subsequent calls and Cipriani was crushed by her death.
“I spoke to the Gloucester group and cried for 45 minutes,” he remembers. “It felt unbearable. It was difficult for everyone and uncomfortable to show such emotion in a rugby environment. But in the next game I set up a try. I didn’t feel like I could get off the floor but seven of the boys picked me up. They were great and I’ve been on a beautiful ride since then, finding love and happiness.
“When I see beautiful stories now it uplifts me. Our media doesn’t show that so we keep our country in constant fear and judgment. But I’ve learned we’re here to turn our pain into purpose, our anger into love. I don’t have all the answers but I know the work I’ve done internally to turn my life around. If you make a mistake it’s easy to think it’s the end of the world. But it’s a learning experience to keep moving forwards.”
Happily married to Victoria, the 35-year-old is a stepfather and even a stepgrandfather now as he approaches another turning point in his life. Cipriani has the empathy, intelligence and vision to become an inspirational coach but it’s more likely he will focus on work tied to his personal growth for “so much pain and resentment has fallen away”. He says: “All those negative feelings towards my mum and dad, my coaches, the media and, most importantly, myself, have gone. Not carrying resentment and forgiving myself was a real lightbulb moment. I don’t have a busy mind any more. I have so much joy now.”
Cipriani also wants people to “realise that rugby can be played differently, that physicality isn’t the be-all and end-all, that it can exist on a higher plane – things have to change, because if people carry on saying rugby is wonderful as it is, it will be a niche interest within a decade”.
English rugby is stalked by a dearth of imagination, bankruptcy and the ghosts of concussion and, for Cipriani, they are linked. “When you make your players pack on muscle, which is needed in a physical game, and coach them in a fear-based environment, they are going to run around stiffly and there will be more concussions and more worry about the sport. There is no fluidity of movement, no sense of attacking space.
“There are lots of head knocks, but it could be so different if players were encouraged to run into space and make passes so they avoid smashing into a two-man tackle. Let’s grow the game and develop players who are free to express themselves.”
He feels hopeful that the current low will force a transformation. “From this depression and uncertainty, change has to happen. We’ve now lost three Premiership teams and there are rumours others might go. England no longer fill Twickenham. English rugby is in a tricky spot but this is a great opportunity because change has to come. Something different has to happen.”
Cipriani pauses and then, as he fuses his personal life with wider concerns for English rugby, he says: “From my own experience, when the floor’s been taken away from you, you need to address your own ideas and beliefs and have some humility, vulnerability and awareness of the need to change. That’s what people at the top of English rugby need to do now.”
Danny Cipriani’s Who Am I? is published by HarperCollins.
