I DON’T understand rugby. I just about get that football is all about 22 players running around a pitch and trying to get a ball into a net. For everything connected with either game, their dad is usually in charge. And this includes sorting out all their kit.

But, with his dad away, I had to take 14-year-old Albert, who plays football for his local team and has just decided to take up rugby, to get new boots this weekend.

What I didn’t realise is that I needed a doctorate in technology along with a degree in physics and mechanics to even begin to understand what the salesman was saying.

In my naivety, I imagined we might go into a shop, pick a pair of boots, probably black, ask the salesman if he had them in Albert’s size and be out of there in under ten minutes.

In reality, we were faced with a wall of neon rainbow, hundreds of multi-coloured boots claiming the latest scientific advances. There were varying shapes and configurations of plastic studs, metal studs, plastic-and-metal studs, blades and moulded treaded soles.

Some were made of synthetic materials, others of kangaroo leather. You can even buy a revolutionary water resistant high-tech knitted boot, or pairs with inbuilt socks, no laces or, one of the latest innovative gimmicks, flat toecaps to help with “toepunting”, whatever that is.

Boot manufacturers are getting carried away. And how do they come up with such ridiculous names? Mercurial Victory III Dynamic Fit, Magista, Hypervenom, evoSPEED, and Visara sound more like Formula One racing cars than something you put on your feet.

Despite all the sophisticated sounding gimmickry, the shop didn’t offer a foot measuring service, even though Albert’s feet had probably grown half a size while we were in there. They advised us to go to Clarks Shoes across the road. And none of the boots was sold in different width measurements.

“I just want a pair of boots he can wear to play football and rugby in,” I told the salesman.

It depends if he’s playing on hard or soft ground, Astroturf or a 3G pitch, he explained; because you need a different boot for each surface. And you must decide if you want blades or studs, plastic or metal, then whether you need eight or six studs and in what configuration.

He was very patient and talked to me slowly and clearly, as if I was having problems understanding. Which I was.

Now I thought both rugby and football both simply involved running about on grass, with your feet essentially doing the same thing. But, according to the salesman, your feet need different shoes if they’re chasing a different shaped ball.

Just to add to the confusion, some clubs ban particular types of blade or stud: “But it varies from club to club, you’d just have to check,” said the salesman. And most front row rugby players wear larger studs and boots that go up to the ankles, while the backs have different shaped boots, each tailored to their roles on the pitch.

So Albert – who grew out of his last football boots in six months, and plays on grass, which is sometimes dry and hard and sometimes wet and soft, as well as on Astroturf at his school, which is also about to get a 3G pitch – would need at least seven pairs of boots to cover every eventuality.

By this point, I felt as if I had been in the shop a lifetime and was fast losing the will to live.

It must have been all so simple a few hundred years ago, before all these ground-breaking scientific advances in footwear technology, when young men simply wore their steel toe-capped leather boots, with tacks or nails embedded in the soles, to kick a bladder round a park.

After nearly an hour in the shop, studying the various options, we found it impossible to make a decision: “How about just hammering a few nails into your old school shoes, Albert?” I suggested.

WE were sharing birth stories recently when a friend recalled what her husband said, minutes after the birth of their first child. “He rang his parents and blurted out ‘You will never believe what I have just been through’.”