The venue for Danny Cipriani’s first Test start for a decade was fitting. Newlands was hosting what may turn out to be its final international and the England fly-half had a last opportunity to salvage his Test career. The conditions were ideal for England, a saturated pitch ensuring a slow game in which Chris Robshaw could act as a mop, but not for Cipriani, who could have been forgiven for trying too hard in an attempt to impress Eddie Jones. He did not touch the ball for the first eight minutes and only received it 14 times in the match, compared to his half-back partner Ben Youngs’s 91, but it was an evening about quality rather than quantity.
Barry John’s guiding principle was a fly-half should wait for the moment and not get impatient the longer it took to come. It arrived for Cipriani nine minutes from the end when England were five points ahead, an advantage that the evidence of the previous two weeks indicated needed to be improved. England had won a turnover when, not for the first time, South Africa failed to deal with one of Youngs’s box kicks.
England had been far better on the floor than they had in Johannesburg and Bloemfontein, more comfortable with the relative lack of continuity and system-straining pace. Robshaw and Tom Curry dominated, backed up by Joe Launchbury, but until the 72nd minute the most disappointing feature of England’s performance had been their failure to make more of turnovers, too often kicking without scanning first.
When Cipriani received the ball 40 metres out going from left to right, he looked for the support outside him but it was too far away. Handré Pollard was bearing down on him but Cipriani was seized by inspiration rather than his opposite number, scenting space in front of Jonny May.
Cipriani’s running angle favoured a kick with his weaker right foot, so he checked inside and struck the ball with the outside of his left boot as he ducked into Pollard’s challenge, knowing that he could not avoid contact. It ensured he could not only get sufficient weight on the ball but that it would land well infield.
It would probably not have worked for Mike Brown on the other wing, but May is one of the quickest players in the game and he reached the ball with a metre of the in-goal area to spare. Cipriani’s reaction was to hug the wing and hold on: he had come in from the cold.
He had been chosen for that moment. Until then his performance had been more notable for defence than attack: he made five tackles, performed a neat wraparound in the opening half after Owen Farrell had played first receiver to free Brown, cursed two short passes to Curry and Robshaw that failed and was surprisingly overlooked for a penalty‑kick to touch that Elliot Daly kicked out on the full.
Before this tour, Cipriani had been overlooked by Jones, who felt that if the fly-half were not first choice, there were more ideal players to make up the quota of 10s in the squad. The England head coach did not say so but it was as if Jones was judging Cipriani on his reputation for not holding back to coaches. He proved too much for the Martin Johnson regime to handle and was never more than a peripheral figure under Stuart Lancaster.
Cipriani has never seen his role as a pupil in a classroom receiving instruction and it is an indictment of the game that it struggles to cope with players who are too often dismissed as mavericks. Jones may have a reputation as a martinet but he has never been someone who thinks he has all the answers and he needed Cipriani in a team that was happier carrying out a gameplan than reacting.
Cipriani was left out of the first Test 23. It seemed then that it was perhaps a test to see whether he would react petulantly. His presence on the bench the next week was evidence he passed the test and when he was interviewed after yesterday’s match, the player bound for Gloucester and a head coach who encourages his players to question him, Johan Ackermann, wanted to talk about the team rather than himself.
Cipriani has been through too much in the last decade to take anything for granted but at 30 and more olden than golden, he has learned to count to 10, delivering the crowning moment in a match he had spent largely in the background.