While Danny Cipriani's voyage of discovery will take him as far as Australia, Olly Barkley's journey of revelation extended no further than Gloucester before he realised that the grass was exactly the same colour. Mick Cleary writes in the Daily Telegraph.
"The Bath midfielder, once every bit the precocious talent that Cipriani is, and with a few scrapes to his name along the way to boot, has returned to his roots with a view to establishing himself and tilting for an England place before the 2011 World Cup.
"Barkley, first picked for England duty as a teenager by Clive Woodward, chose to take himself off to Gloucester two years ago in order to stretch himself in a new environment. It simply didn't work out, and Barkley was honest enough to admit so, returning last summer to his boyhood club. The fatted calf has been on hold for the prodigal son. Barkley broke his leg during a pre-season training in the Algarve in July and only made his belated re-appearance in Bath colours a fortnight ago against Worcester.
"Bath is more than a rugby club to me," Barkley said. "I had no reason to leave Bath other than I wanted to test myself to see if I could be a better player somewhere else. I didn't want to end my career wondering about those sort of things."
RSS feed
