James Lawton: Cipriani's talent pawned to the cult of celebrity

Jonny Wilkinson had been sending Cipriani text messages of support

If you wanted to find the most haunted face here on the bleakest, most unforgiving night English rugby has ever known at its headquarters – both statistically and morally – you had to join the pack surrounding 21-year-old Danny Cipriani.

Booed as he was from the field as the high-profile scapegoat of a disaster that should more properly have been first assigned to the fiddling hierarchy of the Rugby Football Union – and its hugely rewarded and grandly titled director of "elite" rugby, Rob Andrew – Cipriani's plight was to be the most exposed symbol of a system, and a set of priorities, that had gone horribly wrong.

Four years ago, Sir Clive Woodward, the author of England's World Cup win in 2003, laid down a prototype for continued success. It was pointedly ignored and now the price was being paid most painfully by the player who is supposed to represent the best and most thrilling hopes of the rugby nation.

Instead, Cipriani, for the dreadful moment at least, is not a source of glory but a terrible truth. He is demonstrating what happens when the fundamental principles underpinning any kind of serious progress in sport are ignored. He is the star with a mountain of press cuttings, a heavyweight publicity agent, and not enough solid achievement to fill a small postcard.

What do we really know about Danny Cipriani? A casual observer of the oval ball could provide a workable synopsis. He has brilliant natural talent, devilishly brooding good looks. He loves to be out on the town, squiring models in need of a little publicity; his mother is a paragon of single-parent sacrifice, a taxi driver who worked around the clock to send her boy to a good school and a better life; and at some point he will inevitably announce himself as one of the greatest rugby players ever to pull on the English shirt.

It is, indeed, a press agent's dream. Unfortunately, it isn't happening and on Saturday to a degree that at times was quite shocking – most notably when his laboriously conceived kick was snaffled up his South African counterpart, Ruan Pienaar, and run in for a try that would prove England's breaking point in a humiliation that was guaranteed to bite into their bones.

The problem is that to have a career crisis you must first have a career, something that on the international field once again proved elusive, if not derisory for the man who so often decorates a red-top tabloid page.

Cipriani has all the trappings of stardom, the aura of someone set apart, but in these early days virtually none of the gravitas, and very little of the nerve, that defines the vital difference between promise and reality. That is what can happen when celebrity overtakes the first significant strides of an outstanding talent. For a classic example you don't have to step beyond the rugby touchline too far to find a gut-wrenching parallel: the story of Paul Gascoigne, a football talent heralded in even more extravagant terms when he unfurled a game that appeared to be on another plane.

Gazza was a household name at 21, but how did that augment his superb natural gifts? It won him record and modelling contracts – and a pressure to perform, exceptionally and consistently, on the field that he could never quite meet.

Unlike Gascoigne, Cipriani has the benefit of a good education and an apparently sturdier self-belief. It is also true that after still another troubling performance he denied fiercely that his instant fame, the attention from beyond the world of rugby that envelops him before every big game, was contributing to his failure to deliver anything like the best of his ability.

"Everyone who wears the No 10 shirt has to go through this," he said.

"A defeat like this is just another step that everyone has to take. Winning and losing are part of rugby, and you just have to respond in the right way. You have to go on. Yes, I'm very disappointed by my performance today. It was the worst day of my rugby life, but if you are to do anything you have to live through this kind of thing. You have to train hard and come up to the mark. You have to develop a hard shell. Like the rest of the team, I will be working very hard these next few days."

He will do so with the support of his sainted, heroic predecessor Jonny Wilkinson, who had been sending text messages of support before the one of commiseration made necessary by the withering ordeal inflicted by the South Africans.

But what can Wilkinson really tell the young pretender who appears at times to occupy another planet? That, like himself at a similar age, he has to expel all distractions in the drive to develop the one thing that makes him truly unique, his extraordinary aptitude to play rugby; not to draw the paparazzi but to rip apart a covering defence in one moment of divine inspiration. Wilkinson rarely enjoyed such sweet revelation, but he compensated every time he went on the field with an extraordinary will and application.

Watching some of the indecision of Cipriani, and also the fleeting glimpses of beautiful hand and foot control and some passes which might have come from the barrel of a gun, you couldn't help yearning for the authority of another much blessed half-back of another rugby age.

When Barry John met Gareth Edwards for the first time on the training field of Wales, he was asked by the great man, "How do you want the ball, short or long." The twinkling boy replied, "You throw it, Gareth. I'll catch it."

You place that against the recent reaction of one of Cipriani's more experienced Wasps' team-mates, Josh Lewsey, who threw a punch when apparently exasperated by what he considered both the arrogance and unprofessional nonchalance in the young player. Some attributed that to nothing more than a twinge of jealousy by an old hand confronted by the peacock strutting of an unproven boy. The point of comparison with the legendary Welshman is, of course, that no one was ever left in any doubt that Barry John had come to play, only to play.

None of this can be fairly linked directly to the fact that South Africa, a team supposedly near to their knees with fatigue and frequently confused by the eccentricities of their politically imposed coach Peter de Villiers, belonged in an entirely different and superior class to Martin Johnson's England.

The great former captain admitted that the next few days will be a brutal examination of both his players and himself. Plainly, he has to consider the lack of impact of his coaching staff – and his own failure to provide instant motivation. He has to find a survival mode before any progress can be made. He also has to brace himself for fresh pain at the hands of the All Blacks.

For Danny Cipriani the requirement could scarcely be more specific. He has to remember that playing at the highest level of sport is not the same as show business. There can be no rehearsals of the moments that make – or break – your place at the heart of the action. You either do it or you don't.

The time for him to do it has never been more pressing.