“I told you there was caffeine in dark chocolate and you were about to burst into tears”

It’s not so much a cheat meal as it is just a better, acceptable treat.

The life of a professional athlete isn’t an easy gig and if you talk to any of them, they’ll all tell you how important nutrition is. It doesn’t matter how well you design the car, so to speak, if you’re going to fill it with the wrong petrol.

So Josh van der Flier’s life has been dedicated to being the best version of himself that he can be. He’s meticulous in his preparation because his life is designed around being a flanker.

His indulgence? Dark chocolate.

With more cocoa and little to no sugars, dark chocolate is what you’d call a healthier version of milk chocolate and it can still satisfy a sweet tooth.

Rugby players in general are an obsessive breed – they’ll do what it takes, they’ll take on all the advice you have to give them and they’ll carry on in their pursuit of improvement. The sleep workshops introduced a couple of years ago were a perfect example of how that sport and its people are constantly looking for fine margins and, for van der Flier, if eating dark chocolate is better than the regular, then he’ll obviously do that.

What he didn’t know, however, was the caffeine ingredient it contains.

That’s another thing he’d try to avoid but, when Andrew Trimble broke it to him in 2016 that dark chocolate contained caffeine, he had to alter the timing at least of his eating.

On the latest episode of Baz and Andrew’s House of Rugby, Trimble recalled that conversation with van der Flier.

Andrew: Josh, tell me this: do you still eat a lot of dark chocolate?

Josh: I do, yeah, I do actually eat a lot of dark chocolate.

Andrew: Everyone knows the way you are and how thorough you are and you leave no stone unturned. You’re exactly the kind of Schmidt model of a player. And, as part of that, you don’t drinking any coffee because you’re trying to avoid caffeine.

Josh: Yeah.

Andrew: You were telling me how you’d eat a lot of dark chocolate, that you’d be snacking away and letting loose with dark chocolate. I was able to point out that there was caffeine in dark chocolate. I think you were about to burst into tears, Josh.

Josh: It was the saddest… I can remember exactly where you were standing and where I was standing. At Carton House beside the snack place. I was pretty disappointed to hear that. I’d be careful now, I wouldn’t have too much. I used to always have it just before bed and then you told me that and I was like, ‘he’s got to be winding me up’. But still snacking away on them.

Listen to the full show below.

The FootballJOE quiz: Were you paying attention? – episode 10