I Have Spent Years Cleaning Up Rugby's PR Messes, And One Team Still Hasn't Learned The Lesson

The parts of this job nobody outside it ever really sees

In Santiago del Estero on the 18th of this month, there was a wall with a furious man on one side and a party in full swing on the other.

Felipe Contepomi, the Argentinian head coach, was trying to get through his post match press conference. Through the wall, England’s changing room was in full voice, music blaring, players singing, Henry Pollock at the centre of it, bare chested, drink in hand, dancing for cameras that England Rugby’s own media team had put in the room. Four minutes in, Contepomi stood up, said he was leaving because of the lack of respect being shown, and walked out.

I want to be careful about what I am actually taking issue with here, because it is not the celebrating. England had just won 31 24 in one of the most chaotic Tests of the year. Seven players were yellow carded across the match. Argentina were denied a try in the final minutes that looked, on replay, close enough to have changed the result. Before the match, Pollock had already been filmed winding up Argentina’s fans from the team bus. During it, Ellis Genge needled the crowd by mimicking Enzo Fernandez’s chin cupping celebration from football’s World Cup semi final only days earlier, in a stadium already wearing Maradona shirts and waving Falklands banners. It was a strange, brutal, needle filled afternoon of rugby, and if you have ever played or worked in a changing room after a win fought that hard for, you know exactly what that room sounded like. I would never tell a team not to enjoy it.

What I would say, and what nobody around that England squad seems to be saying, is that there is a difference between celebrating and managing how that celebration is going to look to everybody who was not in the room. Steve Borthwick was asked afterwards about the discipline that had nearly cost his side the game. He waved the question away, telling reporters they were the “negativity committee” and that the team deserved credit rather than scrutiny. Contepomi, for his part, did not stay to be questioned about any of it either. He simply left.

That is as far as the public story goes. What actually explains it, what it cost people who were nowhere near that room, and where I genuinely land on Pollock himself, all of that is below for paying members of The Dressing Room.