Club Challenge provides gala occasion

If you seek confrontation in a team context, nothing delivers like rugby league. It’s unrelenting and unflinching. Few sports punish a mistake so hard and so often; few sports provide a better setting for the out-of-the-blue moment of audacity and flair that turns matches.

Time, then, to turn to the Carnegie World Club Challenge tomorrow afternoon, in which Australia’s finest take on the best this country can come up with. The Australian bunch rejoice under the name of Manly, but it is not an occasion on which Leeds Rhinos will be seeking to bring out their feminine side. British teams have a pretty good record in this fixture — perhaps unfortunately for its validity, it has been held in this country since 1994 — but Manly are good enough to win here. Watch out for Jamie Lyon, left, formerly of St Helens, at centre.

It is obviously every Brit’s eternal duty to cheer for any team in any sport when the opponents are from Australia, but this is a fixture that can take you way beyond partisanship. If it brings out the best of rugby league — and it might well do that — it will be an occasion to remember. Rugby league is a sport short of gala occasions, but it tends to rise to the ones it has.

Fizz of promise dominates centre stage

With a mature athlete, no matter how brilliant, you know what you’ve got, and there is always a sense of anticlimax in that. When the athlete is young, unformed and talented, the thrill of infinite promise takes over and it is a rare and special delight.

Which is to say that it’s time for the Carling Cup final. Alas, Arsenal won’t be there with their prepubescent puppies of war, but Manchester United plan to line up with the players who got them to the final — young men rather than kids, but still with that fizz of promise about them.

The instant Cristiano Ronaldo steps on to the pitch, I will become a lifelong Tottenham Hotspur fan, for this is an occasion when the big clubs are morally bound to stick with the untried and untested. Sadly Rafael Da Silva, one of the Brazilian twins — both full backs, like the Neville brothers, only skilful — has been ruled out by injury but it will be fun to watch the precociously assured Jonny Evans, right, and the unproven striker Danny Welbeck. Me, I’m on the side of youth and promise and the magical feeling of seeing a young lad doing his stuff and believing, if only for an instant, that he could be the greatest player that ever laced a boot.

Time for the understudies to bow out

Talk of partisanship brings us to the RBS Six Nations Championship. England play in Dublin today and I must say that I am feeling more Irish by the minute. Ireland’s hopes for a grand slam will be tested against England’s hopes not to lose too badly and I’m beginning to feel that I have, for a while, reached the useful limit of patriotism with this lot.

But I’m not really up to saying anything bad about them. That’s because the England set-up is full of really good chaps trying really hard and really doing the best they can. Which is another way of saying “not good enough”.

England now have Toby Flood, of Leicester, at fly half: the perpetual reserve, one of life’s No 2s, the understudy who took the stage and became . . . an understudy. He’s another really good chap and I’ll hear nothing against him unless I say it myself.

Barring, then, a miracle from a place in which miracles don’t happen, I’ll be looking for a detonation of brilliance from Ireland. And hoping it lasts to the end of the championship in Cardiff.