Room 101: Andy Boyde – Harrogate forward

1. Shopping off the peg
Shopping for designer jeans and thinking you’ll be able to just walk into a shop and pick what you like off the peg for many rugby players is a thankless task. Even when the shop assistant, who you presume is dying for a sale to up his month’s commission, looks at you and says 34/32 sir?
Now in isolation these measurements are probably correct for your waist and leg length but put the two together and you get jeans that fit you on the legs but you’d need a waistline like humpty dumpty to fill the waist. Alternatively you get a pair of jeans that would fit you around the waist and they don’t make it past your quads! The sooner ‘skinny jeans’ go out of fashion the probability of buying jeans off the peg for a lot of rugby lads will improve substantially.
I don’t want to buy every pair of jeans from Next or get a decent designer pair altered; I just want to pick what I want off the shelf like every regular punter.
TRP verdict: We’re both cut from the same cloth so you’re in again.
2. Collapsed mauls
Here’s the scenario – an attacking player runs upright into a defensive contact situation and loses momentum by running into a couple of opposition defenders and a ‘choke tackle’ arises. The referee then calls ‘maul’ which is now some sort of green light for the defenders to drop the maul to the floor quicker than an over-balanced pile of Jenga bricks. The defenders make no attempt to roll away or even attempt to get back on their feet and just lie there instead to make sure the ball doesn’t touch the floor. A really negative rule that deserves a spot in Room 101.
TRP verdict: We can’t find any ‘floors’ in this argument.
3. Young lads & (anti)social media
We have food kindly put on by the club after every training session on a Tuesday and Thursday night. The ‘squad feed’ is a chance for the boys to clock out for the night and have some craic with the rest of the squad following a tough’s night’s training.
Unfortunately the trait among the young lads is to be so fixated on their smart phone that they don’t utter a word to anyone. Confusingly they are far keener to communicate over the likes of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter rather than, God forbid, not look at their phone for half an hour and actually have a conventional conversation.
TRP verdict: Apparently there are only 144 characters left in the game.