Tomas Albornoz will miss Argentina's Test against South Africa in Buenos Aires on Saturday after World Rugby suspended the fly-half for four matches over his confrontation with referee Angus Gardner.
The sanction, confirmed on Wednesday, closes the disciplinary chapter on one of the ugliest nights of the Nations Championship's first year. Argentina lost 31-24 to England in Santiago del Estero on 18 July, a match that produced seven yellow cards and ended with Bautista Delguy having a last-gasp try overturned after a prolonged review between Gardner and TMO Brett Cronan. Albornoz threw the ball into the ground, went after the referee and had to be physically restrained — first by a member of the coaching staff, then by a team-mate.
Albornoz admitted the charge. World Rugby's disciplinary committee set out the reasoning in detail.
"Tomas Albornoz has been suspended for four matches after admitting misconduct arising from interactions with match officials following Argentina's Nations Championship match against England on July 18," the governing body said in its statement.
"The committee accepted that contact with referee Angus Gardner, although limited in nature, occurred while disputing a match official's decision and formed part of that overall course of intimidatory conduct. The committee also noted that Albornoz approached the referee on two separate occasions and had to be restrained by team-mates."
The committee drew a careful line around what Albornoz had and had not conceded.
"While Albornoz accepted that his conduct amounted to intimidation of a match official, he did not accept that his actions were abusive, insulting, offensive or threatening. That distinction was accepted by both World Rugby and the committee."
The entry point for contact with a match official under Appendix 1 to Regulation 17 is six matches. Albornoz's early guilty plea, his undertaking to issue public and private written apologies and a clean disciplinary record brought it down to four. He will now miss the Springboks Test on 8 August, both Tests against Australia on 29 August and 5 September, and Toulon's Top 14 fixture against La Rochelle on 12 September.
The wider picture was worse than one player's outburst. Objects were thrown at Gardner and his officiating team as they left the field, and Argentina head coach Felipe Contepomi walked out of his post-match press conference after four minutes, accusing England of "a lack of respect" over celebrations audible from the neighbouring dressing room.
Nigel Owens, reviewing the game on World Rugby's Whistle Watch show alongside Wales centre Jamie Roberts, was unsparing about what followed the whistle.
"You want all that excitement; it's part of the theatre of the sport. But what you don't want is it to spill over into disagreement and players running up to referees and then all the sort of abuse on social media that comes from it, which is totally, totally unacceptable," Owens said.
"Walking off the pitch and then abuse from the crowd, something being chucked, not a part of the game and should never be part of the game, and that needs to be dealt with fairly but very strictly as well."
Owens, though, also turned the lens on the officials. He believes the extended back-and-forth between Gardner and his TMO is what manufactured the doubt.
"The learning from this is that the confusion from the situation was the debate between the TMO and the referee. And then that puts a doubt in everybody's mind," he said. "So what you don't want is this flip-flopping. This is what made it now a debate was the back and forth."
He still thinks the call was right: "Do I think they probably got it right? I think they have. It's one of those decisions. Whatever one you give, one team's going to be happy, one isn't."
Not everyone in Argentina accepts that. Federico Mendez — 74 caps, twice a Champions Cup winner with Bath and Northampton, and a man sent off as a teenager at Twickenham for punching Paul Ackford — told Planet Rugby the officiating deserved scrutiny even as he demanded better from his countrymen.
"As rugby people, we know that what the referee says is the last word," Mendez said. "This is rugby rules. You have to behave. You have to control yourself. It's been the bottom line since rugby started."
But he added: "I would just say in consideration, if you actually check what happened with the last try, you can see there was something wrong by the referee or the TMO. Something was not right."
England's most-capped player, Ben Youngs, was blunter, describing the scenes as "totally disgraceful, unforgivable behaviour" and saying he hoped bans followed.
Rassie Erasmus, whose Springboks face the Pumas at Estadio Jose Amalfitani on Saturday, declined to pile on. Asked whether he expected anything untoward from Argentina, the South Africa coach pushed back on the idea that they are the game's bad actors.
"We know Argentina well. We play them twice every year apart from this year, so we know their players, and they know us," Erasmus said. "Some of our players play with them at French clubs, others play with them in Japan, so we've come a long way with their guys."
"What happened in their previous game in terms of the refereeing is not for us to comment. We've got Christophe Ridley as the referee for this weekend. Obviously the new protocols make it quite tough to communicate with the referee before a game. But we've never experienced Argentina to be a team that's negative or too feisty. Obviously they're hard men and physical guys, but we've never found them to be unsportsmanlike."
Contepomi has named 10 newcomers for Saturday, most of them young, with an eye on the 2027 World Cup. He will do it without his first-choice fly-half.
