England skipper Jamie George hits out over ‘unacceptable’ nightclub behaviour of ‘immature’ Saracens rookie

England skipper Jamie George has branded Saracens rookie Totoa Auvaa as “immature” following his “unacceptable” headline-making nightclub altercation with Test cricketer Gus Atkinson.

Saracens’ end-of-season night out on Sunday, June 7, following their loss at Exeter the previous afternoon, ended in controversy with the 21-year-old Auvaa said to have aimed a punch at Atkinson, who was at the Rex Rooms nightclub in London with England captain Ben Stokes. The punch missed its intended target, instead striking a member of the English Cricket Board’s security staff.

The ECB made bowler Atkinson and skipper Stokes unavailable for England’s second Test defeat to New Zealand pending their enquiry into events.

Its disciplinary hearing outcome was to find that Atkinson and Stokes had breached contractual obligations but were blameless for the violent conduct, a decision that resulted in the pair receiving a written warning with no further action taken.

Auvaa, meanwhile, was not punished for his pub crawl behaviour when Saracens announced the findings of its investigation earlier this week.

The cricketers and the Saracens players had come across each other earlier in the evening at a pub where all was cordial. However, things took a turn for the worse when the party carried on at a nearby nightclub, and the fallout has now resulted in George now taking the Saracens academy player to task.

The veteran hooker has been named as the England captain for their upcoming Nations Championship fixtures, a schedule that begins away to South Africa in Johannesburg on July 4, but at a media appearance ahead of the three-match tour, which also includes playing Fiji in Liverpool and Argentina in Santiago del Estero, included George fielding questions about Saracens’ unfortunate man of the moment.

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“He’s a young kid who has only left Samoa once,” explained George at the England media briefing. “He is immature. He is a rabbit in the headlights in London. He’s a good kid, but has got it wrong. There is no disputing that. But we need to make sure we establish that sort of behaviour is unacceptable.

“We have got to look after him because he doesn’t know right from wrong at the minute. A lot of young people get it wrong in some way, shape or form. If we just got rid of all those people, a lot of lads (in the England squad) wouldn’t be standing on the field today. We will look after him. We will make sure that he has got role models around him.

“Theo McFarland (the Samoan back-rower) is someone he has looked up to for a long time, so Theo leaving is not ideal but there are a lot of other guys he is going to look up to and listen to and the club are going to make sure they get that right.

“Brendan Venter (Saracens’ new director of rugby) coming in is probably a good time to get him under his wing. He is a fantastic prospect in terms of his rugby. If he gets his head down, then he is going to be a lot of hard work for a lot of teams in the Prem.”

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The pity about the Saracens’ meet-up with the England cricketers was that the exchanges had been friendly at the pub before the action moved onto the nightclub. Cricket fan George, who was present at the pub but not at the nightclub, recalled having an enlightening chat with cricketer Joe Root.

“It was an unbelievable chat,” he said. “We were actually talking about the parallels in our careers, which is a really cool story that we might have been unable to share if it had not been tarnished by a bit of a drunken altercation.

“It has been blown out of proportion a little bit, but that is the world that we’re in. I was at the pub with our end-of-season do and Ben Stokes had messaged me saying are you guys around and so we met up.

“They then kicked on, but thankfully I was in an Uber on my way home when that whole thing happened and I woke up to a phone call asking what happened.”

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