Moral panic as it emerges rugby player actually drank on rugby tour

There was widespread outrage and moral panic in rugby union circles yesterday after an England prop told the truth in an interview with the media.

Harlequins, England and British and Irish Lions loosehead Joe Marler broke ranks on the weekend and told the actual truth when questioned about the Lions tour of New Zealand this summer.

Instead of the resorting to the archetypal platitudes that most players deploy in these circumstances, Marler instead opted to be frank with reporters.

When asked what he learned on the Lions tour, Marler said: "How to drink".

The looshead also admitted: "My drinking ability had to step up a bit.

"It was a different tour particularly for the midweek 'veg' as we were labeled. It was more like an old-school sort of tour basically. I didn't expect it - I thought those days are kind of gone now.

"Rory Best is the one to blame for that," he added. "He is the one to blame for every time I spoke to my wife on FaceTime she said: 'are you pissed again?' And I was: 'Of course not'.

"That is probably the biggest thing I learned."

Strangely Marler's ability to smash opponents was not effected by acting like a normal human being and having a few pints when not working.

Marler also foolishly pointed out the bleeding obvious, that Warren Gatland had a set player selection for the Test team that would be very hard to crack into.

"You could read between the lines of when teams were picked, and what teams were picked on what days, and what teams they were playing against,' said Marler.

"But that didn't detract from us working our bollocks off as much as we could because we wanted to be part of a successful Lions tour. We wanted the boys to go out there and win 3-0."