Two years on from one of Northampton Saints' most cathartic afternoons, and a few months on from one of England's most jarring international windows, Alex Mitchell and Fraser Dingwall sat down for PREM Rugby to talk about both — and to admit, with the kind of mid-season honesty professional players rarely get to indulge, that the Six Nations campaign that just was had not been what they were expecting.
Dingwall, the Northampton centre and one of England's most reliable midfield bodies, did not bother with preamble.
"The Six Nations was very disappointing as a whole really, wasn't it?" he said. "There was a lot of optimism going into it. We were 11 from 11 going into it, or 12 from 12. And then it was just disappointing. We just didn't get much right and then it became more pressurised and just fearful of losing again, in a way."
Mitchell, the Saints scrum-half, agreed and walked back over the same ground.
"It was frustrating," he said. "I think we kind of knew we weren't that far off. The pressure from the outside — obviously losing against Scotland, we felt like we could have got a result there. Then Ireland really showed up, and obviously the media then just turn. You go from the best team in the world, don't you, to the worst team in the world in the matter of three, four weeks. So it's tough to take, but the last game against France in the Stade de France [shows] that you're not that far off."
The pair were also candid about how they handle the volume of social-media commentary that follows a Six Nations campaign, especially a bad one. Dingwall said the trick was to be selective about whose opinion you took on at all.
"You're not going to please everyone," he said. "Actually taking the opinions of those who matter, whether it be your family and coaches or people in and around rugby who actually know the stuff, kind of know what's going on. That's the better way to deal with it."
Mitchell, who admits to swiping past anything that lands in his feed, made the point — half-jokingly — that even man-of-the-match performances tend to attract a chorus of dissent.
"If you've had man of the match, there'll be someone slagging you off, like, how, man, who's had the worst game," he said. "It's ying and yang. You can never really win."
The more reflective half of the conversation came when both players were asked which moment from their careers they would bottle up. Dingwall was first.
"I'd say the Premiership final in 2024," he said. "The exit after the final whistle when [Tommy Freeman] kicks it out, which just — yeah. I'd definitely bottle that. That was pure joy."
Mitchell agreed it would be in his top two but landed on a more recent moment instead.
"When I scored against New Zealand this autumn," he said. "My England pathway had been topsy-turvy and whatnot, and then that was quite a nice moment. We obviously won that game and even so, that kind of felt like the winning try as well, didn't it?"
They returned to the 2024 Premiership campaign more than once. Dingwall, who joined the club in 2015 the year after their previous title, framed the win as the culmination of a five-year arc under Phil Dowson.
"It was obviously all the time it took to get there, all the hard work that's put in," he said. "It felt like a five-year plan in terms of when we first started playing — when [Dowson] first brought us through and then season after season getting better, to then knock out in semis and then finally grew up a bit and did it really, didn't we? Yeah."
Mitchell remembered the bus tour around Northampton with the trophy almost as much as the game itself.
"I just remember for the bus tour it being organised and being like, 'Oh, this might be a bit awkward. I don't know if anyone's actually going to come,'" he said. "And then we were here, weren't we? There were people along the street kind of waving to us, and then we turned the corner by the market and the whole road was full. Like, oh wow, actually people do care a bit. And it was quite cool."
The two also touched on their early-career imposter syndrome, the strangeness of being named in England squads they did not feel they had earned, and a state-school-versus-private-school question Dingwall handled with characteristic deflection. He had moved schools to Bedford School on a Northampton-arranged scholarship as a teenager, but did not see his pathway as anything other than lucky.
"I was quite lucky cuz my state school had a big rugby program and pushed rugby a lot," he said. "It is a shame with state schools — a lot of them go down the football route, the access isn't there as much. But it's still a lot of people that do play."
The wider message from the chat was straightforward enough. Northampton's senior duo are not in denial about how the Six Nations went, are honest about the noise it created around them, and are perfectly capable of holding the 2024 high — and a Saints' jersey they still very obviously love wearing — alongside the 2026 disappointment. The Premiership finale and the run into next season's Test window will sort out which version of England wins out.
