Argentina coach Felipe Contepomi accused England flanker Tom Curry of hitting him in the tunnel after England beat his side 27-23, calling him a bully and slamming his “reckless” tackle that took Juan Cruz Mallia out of the game.<\/p>\n
Curry hit Mallia just after he launched a long kick out of defence five minutes from time and the fullback suffered a knee injury that Contepomi said could be damage to his ACL.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know where to start with it,” Contepomi told journalists. “Slightly late? I would call it reckless… I cannot understand how we ended up playing with 14, they ended up with 15 and it was not even checked out.”<\/p>\n
He added further criticism of the England flanker. “Let me say, it is not only that because probably it is part of his nature to bully people. But he came off in the tunnel and he gave me a little smack,” he said.<\/p>\n
Asked to clarify, he agreed with a journalist that it was a push, and then called it a “hit on the chest”.<\/p>\n
“So maybe it is his nature I don’t know. Probably those are the guys we are rewarding and we praise. Maybe that\u2019s where we want rugby to go, I don\u2019t know,” he said.<\/p>\n
“How old is he, 27, strong and I am 48 and he comes and just hit me. Luckily there are probably cameras there.<\/p>\n
“I was standing there and he was coming and wanted to say ‘hi’ to one of our coaches but we said no because we were upset. He was reckless and broke our player\u2019s knee. I know it is rugby but if we don\u2019t look after each other in rugby it could be dangerous. He was coming and I said ‘mate you broke his knee\u2019 and he said \u2018f**k off\u2019 and pushed me.<\/p>\n
“I am not happy with the situation, after breaking someone\u2019s knee I think you need to be at least humble enough and respectful to say \u2018sorry I did something wrong\u2019 but he went the opposite.”<\/p>\n
England coach Steve Borthwick said he was aware that something had happened, but had not seen it. “I wouldn’t want that in any instance to be the centre of attention,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I think that anybody in this room who has had any contact with Tom Curry knows the character of the man – his character is impeccable.”<\/p>\n
England centre Henry Slade also gave his support to Curry. “He is the furthest thing from a bully I have ever seen,” he said. “He’s such a genuine, genuine guy who cares a lot about everyone, a very tough guy but I wouldn’t say he’s anywhere near being a bully at all.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Argentina coach Felipe Contepomi accused England flanker Tom Curry of hitting him in the tunnel after England beat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-155999","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}