Afternoon:
9°c
This fella drives straight into the back of a truck, an old joke has it, and is breathalysed by the police.
"Right, sir," says the constable, "you'll have to accompany us to the station. You are six times over the legal limit. What on earth were you thinking?" "Well, it's like this, officer" slurs the motorist, "there's nothing more depressing than having a nasty crash when you're stone cold sober." Whenever I hear this joke, I think of rugby union. Who in possession of their senses would wish to engage in this brutal form of legalised GBH without a few drinks inside them to numb the agony of gouged eyeballs and violently yanked privates? Judging by his decision to spare Danny Cipriani his first international start against Scotland, England coach Brian Ashton disagrees. Indeed he goes further than disapproving of booze, dispatching Danny back to Wasps for emerging from a nightclub shortly after midnight yesterday morning, fully twoand-a-half days before that scheduled appearance at full back, anything but sozzled.
Imagine the wry smiles on the faces of his recent equivalents in the worlds of football and cricket as they read of Ashton's Draconian twittishness.
Duncan Fletcher had to endure the Fredalo incident without sending Andrew Flintoff home from the World Cup, while God knows how many blind eyes Steve McClaren felt obliged to turn to slightly more serious misdemeanours than Danny's. Even that fearsome disciplinarian Fabio Capello wouldn't demean himself by so much as acknowledging something so trivial.
Then again, Danny Cipriani is a 20- year-old tyro, where Messrs Flintoff and John Terry — whose night out in a lap dancing club a few days after the Croatia fiasco went unpunished — were captains of their country. We cannot know whether Ashton would have been as harsh had a more stellar name committed this trifling faux pas. But he did used to teach at a Jesuit public school in Stoneyhurst, and those Jesuits aren't known for their tolerance of merriment.
When the over-promoted are ' If his over- finally Ashton's tenuous his job, mourn floundering badly in a job, their reflex reaction is take refuge in a previous comfort zone, so it's no surprise to find Ashton behaving like a pedantic housemaster towards an errant new bug.
Nor will it be a shock to find Lawrence Dallaglio and other disaffected old boys lacerating him for this.
They'd be right to do so. If this overreaction finally breaks Ashton's already tenuous hold on his job, few will mourn his passing, because the last thing we want in a rugby international is a choirboy striving to break free.
One Jonny Wilkinson is enough.
This is a game for middle class hooligans, and never are they so endearing as when displaying the boorishness Harry Enfield captured in a memorably brilliant rugger bugger boozing sketch. And even that satire was no match for my favourite imbecility (the time in the 1980s when the England XV were presented with bottles of cologne, specially created in their honour, at a reception in Paris. Prop Colin Smart thanked the dignitary, unscrewed the cap, had a sniff and downed the lot in one gulp.
That's the sort of inspired idiocy we relish in chasers of the egg, and the only punishment Cipriani would have received in that gaudier era would have been a debagging, and possibly a handcuffing to a seat on the overnight train to Inverness.
The only inappropriate aspect to his behaviour, in fact, was leaving a club after midnight on two feet rather than all fours.
