Martin Castrogiovanni enjoyed a long and successful career, but it was not one without controversy.
The Italian centurion was at the centre of numerous off-field spats, usually with the hierarchy of whichever club he was at at the time.
As a guest on RugbyPass TV’s Kick Offs and Kick Ons recently, where he joined Adam Ashley-Cooper and former Toulon team-mates Matt Giteau and Drew Mitchell, the former tighthead prop regaled the show with some of the brushes with his superiors.
While his fallout with Richard Cockerill at Leicester Tigers and his trip to Las Vegas with Zlatan Ibrahimovic during his time at Racing 92 are well documented, he recounted his first meeting with Bernard Laporte at Toulon.
Montpellier
Toulon
The 119-cap international made the move to the Côte d’Azur in 2013, linking up with former France coach Laporte, who had coached the side for the past two seasons. However, his first meeting with his new head coach, presumably at preseason, did not go well.
“I didn’t get along with the French, worse than Cockers [Cockerill],” he said on the show.
“But when you get to the club, you need to go early, because if you go late, you should go and say ‘hello, hello’ in England, or whatever. No, in France, you just need to go and give handshakes to every person.
“This was [Bernard] Laporte – when he sees Giteau, he played for Australia, or Drew, he played for Australia – ‘oh hello, hello, how are you?’ Carl [Hayman] too.
“When he came to me on the first day, he went like that [reaches out his hand without looking], with his hand like that. I grabbed his hand and said ‘if you want to say hello to me, you should look at my face, like you do with everyone else!’ I never played again in Toulon. That was my first day. He f****** hated me.”
Castrogiovanni did indeed go on to play for Toulon over the next two seasons, featuring in the Heineken Cup final triumph in his debut campaign, but he did not outlast Laporte at the club, moving to Racing 92 at the end of the 2014/15 season.