Michael McIntyre never stops beaming, never stops punctuating his commentary with hearty laughter, not even when he is recounting how, not so very long ago, he broke down in public and sobbed at the failure of his career to take off.

Extreme rainfall that swamped northern England with devastating floods, sweeping away bridges, making hundreds homeless and killing a policeman, was the heaviest ever recorded in Britain in a 24-hour period.

Some of the rugby I've seen played in the British Isles of late, including major international contests, has set me thinking anew about what I consider to be one of the burning topics in the modern game: the relationship between coaches and players, both before a match and during it.

By and large, Englishmen do not know a fat lot about winning games of rugby against the All Blacks. Only two men in red-rose history – Jason Leonard and a chap by the name of Martin Osborne Johnson – have tasted the glory of it more than once, and of those, only Johnson can claim to be in hat-trick territory.

Dylan Hartley usually gives newspapers a wide berth, but as he spent last week at the England team headquarters in Surrey rather than on the dark side of Planet Zog, he could not help detecting just a whiff of pessimism concerning the immediate survival prospects of the red-rose pack. "Everyone thought we were going to be bullied by the Argentines," he says, grinning from ear to ear. "But we weren't bullied, were we? We won 80 per cent of the ... more