Back in December 2018, the Italian Under-20 side played a friendly in Grenoble on a worn-looking training pitch. A gust of wind might have blown away the sleight 19-year-old French scrumhalf who was playing for the Grenoble espoirs, but after the game he and his Italian grandfather approached the Azzurri Under-20 coach Fabio Roselli.
They informed Roselli that the boy was Italian-qualified. And the rest, as they say, is history. Within less than four years Ange Capuozzo has had a truly transformative effect on Italian rugby.
Roselli watched out for Capuozzo’s progress, although he would only play one game for Grenoble in the 2018-19 Top 14 that season – on May 18th, Capuozzo made his senior debut off the bench away to Pau, as a replacement scrumhalf. Grenoble were relegated at the end of the season.
Roselli called Capuozzo into the Italian squad for the 2019 World Rugby Under-20 Championship in Argentina, whereupon the coach was left short of options at fullback. Roselli recalled Capuozzo playing the last few minutes of that game in Grenoble at fullback and asked him to switch roles. Capuozzo made his Italian Under-20 debut in their second game of the tournament against England in Santa Fe and capped a fine game with a try. He retained his place for the rest of the tournament, scoring two tries in five games.
Back at Grenoble, he lit up the ProD2 as a fullback, scoring 18 tries in 51 games over the ensuing three seasons, before Kieran Crowley called him into Italy’s Six Nations squad last year. Making his debut at home to Scotland in round four, the 5′ 10″, 12st 13lbs (82kg) Capuozzo was brought on for the last half-hour, with Scotland leading 26-10. The deficit would soon become 33-10, and that would have been all she wrote but for Capuozzo lighting up the day with two stunningly quick-witted and quick-footed tries. His fearless and electric running took the breath away.
A week later in Cardiff, Capuozzo embarked on his slaloming run past a trail of Welsh players as if making them look like they were jogging on the spot before putting Edoardo Padovani over for the try that ended their near soul-destroying 36-match losing streak in the Six Nations.
His two tries in the historic win over the Wallabies last November ensured he was named as World Rugby’s Breakthrough Player of the Year. He is the first Italian player to ever win the award, and follows in the considerable footsteps of Maro Itoje, Romain Ntamack and Will Jordan, among others.
Heaven knows how the Ange Capuozzo story might have panned out had the Italian Under-20s not stopped by in Grenoble, of all places, for a preparatory 2019 Under-20 Six Nations game. At Grenoble he was considered simply too small for the rigours of Top 14 rugby. Now he plays for Toulouse, although as something of a bit part, full-back cum winger, but back then the bigger clubs took no interest in him.
It must have been fate, for as much as he is a product of French club rugby, he has also risen in spite of French club rugby, and is in many ways a gift of Italian heritage who found his way home. When you see Capuozzo belting out Inno di Mameli before the Italy-Ireland game tomorrow in the Stadio Olimpico as passionately as passionately as Michele Lamaro or Giorgio Chiellini, it is not for show. It comes from his heart, from his rugby bloodline.
We celebrate the Irish diaspora, and of course Italy is also a story of emigration.
Giovanni, Capuozzo’s grandfather, moved from downtown Naples to Grenoble after the second World War to start a gloves fabric business. His son, Frank, who is a keen supporter of this season’s Serie A runaway leaders Napoli, married Emmanuelle, who is from Madagascar. They had three children, Capuozzo and his two sisters, Lisa and Joanne.
It was also Giovanni who took his little grandson Ange to Union Sportive des deux Ponts Rugby in the suburbs of Grenoble to introduce him to rugby in the first place, and the Capuozzos have always been Neapolitan/Italian.
Twenty or more of the extended family, from Naple, Rome, Bologna and Grenoble, attend many of his matches and were in Cardiff when he did his thing.
Like Capuozzo himself, his girlfriend Emma also hails from Saint Raphael Cote Azur and they share a passion for interior design. He studies law and he also plays the piano.
Capuozzo, who cites Mirco Bergamasco and Vincent Clerc as his inspirations, is also a truly modest young man who is not seeking the individual plaudits which have come his way.
There is Italian rugby before Ange Capuozzo and there is Italian rugby after Ange Capuozzo, with that try against Wales a watershed moment, but he counters: “I don’t agree at all. I just do the best I can for the Italy shirt and I am also trying to have fun because there’s no nothing more exciting than running with the ball under your arm, leaving the defenders behind.”
He does that for fun, yet when Italian journalists understandably thrilled with such a good news story reminded him of scoring six tries in his first nine Tests, he told them: “Thank you, but the merit is only of the team and the game we are trying to build with coach Crowley. In rugby there is no match winner.”
As for being the spark that ignited the rebirth of the Azzurri, he reasoned: “So, let’s put it this way, perhaps I arrived in the national team when the fruits of the work begun years earlier were about to reap. I also played for the Italian under-20 team who won fairly regularly and now in the first team there are many of that group.
“There is talent among us just like there is a lot of work to do, but the difference between a victory and a defeat in Test matches is almost always tiny: now with Mitch [Lamaro] and the other guys we breathe confidence in our means and the awareness that together we can also keep up with the big teams.”
Yet no less than the Farrell/Sexton-fuelled Ireland, or the Finn Russell-inspired Scotland, this Italian team’s rugby has embodied a sense of fearlessness, and it seems to come in large part from the presence of Capuozzo.
It’s not just the electric acceleration, as if gliding over the ground, or both the change of direction and footwork of either foot, it is his timing into the line as well as acceleration which make him such a threat. His line break against England in the build-up to Italy’s first try was so late, and well-timed, that he seemed to appear from nowhere.
Still, on receiving his Breakthrough Player of the Year award, tellingly he said: “The try I helped score against Wales in Cardiff is more important than the ones I scored myself, those they just represent my help to the team, the important thing is to get results together.”
You know he means it, and maybe that also explains why his presence has been truly transformative, and with Capuozzo embodying the sense of daring Crowley has infused into this team, his effect on his team-mates appears to be truly talismanic. It is as if the Azzurri now play to Capuozzo’s beat, to his rhythm.
He was once quoted as saying: “There is nothing more beautiful in the world than running with the ball close to your chest”.
It’s a beautiful Italian rugby story all right.
