Room 101: Ollie Thomas – Moseley utility back

1. Diving/play acting in football
Don’t get me wrong I love watching football, although I’m more of an armchair fan than anything else. I’ve probably only been to two games in the flesh – both involving Nottingham Forest, who I’ve supported since I was given a shirt when I was eight. The play acting aspect of football, though, really lets the sport down and seems to be getting more and more prevalent. If refs gave a red card here and there and managers stopped picking players who threw themselves about like drama queens then I’m sure it would all stop pretty quickly. What’s more important…winning a free kick or maintaining your own integrity and the integrity of the sport?
TRP verdict:  Take a bow Ollie, not a dive, you’re in Room 101.
2. Ignorant drivers
Car drivers that don’t give you a little hand wave as an acknowledgement that you’ve let them in at a junction or waited for them to pass you by really annoy me. I’m a pretty laid back guy at the best of times, but I must admit to uttering one or two expletives when this happens. Parents who leave their cars in the middle of the street or blocking the pavement when they go to pick up their kids from school annoy me, too, as do people who scrape your car and don’t leave their contact details. This happened to me in a Sainsbury’s car park a year or so ago when someone took off my wing mirror but left me to pick up the tab.
TRP verdict:  This behaviour needs to be kerb-ed; you’re in Room 101.
3. Monotonous post-match interviews
This phenomenon – where players are products of ‘media training’ – seems to blight the elite end of every mainstream sport, rugby included. In my mind it should be called ‘character depletion training’ as the players’ bland answers give nothing of themselves or their personality away. You can pretty much predict what the answers are going to be before the interviewee has even spoken: ‘We’ll take it one result at a time’, ‘No-one is getting carried away’ etc…Andy Flintoff is a character we all know and love for his fun side and cheeky-chappy nature. But when he was on England duty none of that came across, we had to wait until he was retired and the shackles had come off to see his true personality. Players need to be free to say what they want to say. Yes, they will put their foot in it every now and again but that’s got to be better than robotic answers that just waste air time.
TRP verdict: In this case it’s all about the result not the performance, and I’m pleased to say you’ve got the clean sweep, 3/3.