Nick Cain: Give Danny loving care the same as Quade

Danny Cipriani must be cursing his luck that he wasn’t born an Aussie. Cipriani is a less divisive and outspoken character than Quade Cooper, the Reds fly-half who Warren Gatland believes will play for the Wallabies against the 2013 Lions.
Both fly-halves are 25, outrageously gifted in attack, and should be in their prime. However, where Cooper is rehabilitated on a regular basis by the Aussie hierarchy after his misdemeanours, Cipriani appears to be light years away from playing for England again, let alone for the Lions this summer.
Cipriani was back in the news this week when he was involved in a collision with a double-decker bus in Leeds while taking part in the Otley Run, a 16 venue pub crawl, with his Sale teammates.
Whether a squad which avoided relegation by the skin of their teeth – including a timely five point penalty levied on fellow strugglers London Welsh – should have been out on the town nine days before their last match of the season, is a moot point.
Sale boss Steve Diamond no doubt has his reasons for letting them go out on the razzle, blowing off steam after months of relegation stress, but the pitfalls were laid bare when Cipriani ended up in hospital.
Fortunately, he escaped with bruised ribs after an escapade with a comical ‘all’s well that ends well’ twist to it, but it would have been much less comical if he had been more seriously injured.
What Cipriani’s return to the headlines does highlight is just how far his rugby fortunes have fallen. The seven England caps he won in 2008, including a sparkling attacking display against Ireland, are a distant memory.
Furthermore, his hopes of re-establishing himself as an England contender this season following his return from the Melbourne Rebels to join Sale have been dashed. Unable to make the Sale No.10 jersey his own, he was criticised publicly by the club’s owner, Brian Kennedy, for his poor defence after the club’s 62-0 Heineken Cup rout by Toulon, and in the aftermath he was dropped both by John Mitchell, the club’s caretaker coach, and Diamond.
Cipriani’s poor tackling has been a recurrent theme since he came second in a Wasps training ground spat with Josh Lewsey five years ago, when the World Cup-winner was enraged by his slack defence and chippy attitude.
What is remarkable is that Sale have been totally unable to address it. Yet tackling is a closed skill, and you would have thought that if Cipriani’s technique had been stripped back to the basics one-on-one with an accomplished defence coach, and then rebuilt step by painstaking step, any flaws could have been corrected.
So far, that has not happened, and no sooner had Cipriani left A&E than his Sale teammate Andy Powell tweeted, “Danny Cipriani has been double-deckered # his best tackle of the season yet”.
The contrast with Cooper, who is also a notoriously poor defender, could not be more stark. Cipriani has had his disciplinary problems – mainly around curfews and nightclub forays – but they are not in the same league as his Aussie alter ego’s.
During last season’s Southern Hemisphere rugby championship, Cooper launched a tirade against Wallaby coach Robbie Deans and the Australian Rugby Union, first on twitter and then in an interview, calling the Wallaby camp a “toxic environment”.
It resulted in a £40,000 fine and a three Test ban amid rumours that Cooper would quit the sport and go to Rugby League. His rap sheet also included being charged with burglary by the police in 2009 after allegedly taking two laptops from a private home, a £6,500 fine for bringing the game into disrepute after a dispute with a taxi driver, and a driving disqualification after driving on a suspended license.
However, Cooper signed a new two-year deal with the Reds and the ARU just before the turn of the year.
The evidence suggests that the Aussie rugby culture is far more tolerant of human frailty than its English counterpart. The Aussies are softer on their bad boys, but they are also smarter.  Deans dropped Cooper from his first Wallaby squad of the season – and since then the ‘Toxic One’ has played out of his skin for the Reds.
The Australians accentuate the positives more than the negatives, concentrating, for example, on how Cooper’s extraordinary gifts can unlock defences, while also taking measures to cover his tackling deficiencies. By comparison the English game is unforgiving, with Cipriani in danger of being tagged for good as a defensive liability.
Of course, Australian Rugby Union have always had to nurture their talented players carefully, because, with Australian Rules and Rugby League, there is massive competition for talented sportsmen.
English rugby has always had big player numbers, and this has promoted a next-cab-off-the-rank coaching culture – hailing players and dumping them if they do not make headway immediately.
It is unlikely that the antics surrounding the Wallaby “Brat Pack” of Cooper, Kurtley Beale, James O’Connor and Will Genia would have been tolerated by England head coach Stuart Lancaster, whereas Deans has had to learn to live with it.
It is time that English rugby took steps to get the best out of mavericks like Cipriani, rather than seeing them as disposable commodities.