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Danny Cipriani has likened Eddie Jones to “a horny teenager” in a recent autobiography, revealing that the former England head coach pressed him for details about his sex life at a team hotel.
In the latest extract from Who Am I?, which has been exclusively serialised by The Times and The Sunday Times, former England and Melbourne Rebels player Cipriani suggests Wallabies coach Jones “rules by fear” and recalls a match-winning intervention against South Africa in 2018 that “might have just helped to save Eddie’s job”.
Two years before that, though, before a one-off Test against Wales and a tour of Australia, Jones called up Cipriani for England without giving him any game time.
“We’re all out for dinner on day one, I’m sitting at the end of the table and Eddie comes and sits next to me,” Cipriani writes. “The first words out of his mouth are, ‘Mate, doesn’t [TV presenter] Kirsty Gallacher live around here? … What’s she like?’
“I’ve just split up with Kirsty, after a short relationship, and it’s not something I want to talk to my head coach about, or anyone else for that matter. Eddie keeps pecking, like a horny teenager, and in the end I tell him straight, ‘Eddie, I don’t want to talk about this, it’s making me uncomfortable’.
“Surprise, surprise, I’m not in the squad for the summer international against Wales. He’s picked a part-time No.10 ahead of me. I can’t help thinking Eddie only picked me for that training camp as a joke.”
Eddie Jones and Danny Cipriani.Credit: Getty
During the 2018 series against South Africa, Cipriani remembers a joyless England squad and has since come to the conclusion that the Rugby Football Union “only employed [Jones] because they were having a crisis” after the 2015 World Cup. However, named to start in Cape Town with England staring down the barrel of a sixth consecutive Test defeat, to go with an embarrassing loss to the Barbarians, Cipriani set up a crucial try for Jonny May.
Cipriani described his late grubber kick for May as “acting on well-practised instinct” but said that the changing room afterwards was less “band of brothers” and more “23 blokes who have just completed individual missions”.
That game would turn out to be Cipriani’s 16th and final cap. As he strived for more, only to be overlooked by Jones, he wondered “if shadowy figures at the RFU” were influencing the England head coach. At this stage, Cipriani believed himself to be “the best decision-maker in the country, maybe the world” and told Jones as much.
It has been levelled at Cipriani that a trio of England head coaches – Martin Johnson, Stuart Lancaster and Jones – all seemed to agree he was surplus to requirements. The man himself argues Johnson, “a traditional rugby man”, was “never going to want an opinionated kid like me involved”. Johnson’s successors, Cipriani suggests, were not honest about their reservations.
Cipriani is scathing of Lancaster’s preparations for the World Cup in 2015, suggesting Sam Burgess also believed players were being “treated like kids” by coaches, including former England assistant coach Andy Farrell.
“And look at what happened at the 2011 World Cup: England were an absolute disaster,” he wrote. “Lanny was given the job far too early and wasn’t really in charge anyway. I never had a chance, what with how they wanted to play and the influence of Andy and Owen [Farrell]. But why not be honest? If you thought I was too much of a risk, just say so.”
Telegraph, London
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