Six Nations/England v Ireland: Gerry Thornley on the totemic secondrow who will relish taking on England in fortress Twickenham today

A natural born leader and a natural born winner, going to Twickenham for a tilt at the Triple Crown or a possible title decider without Paul O'Connell doesn't really bear thinking about. Then again, nor does going anywhere else. It wouldn't be stretching things to describe O'Connell as the heartbeat of this Irish pack and, along with Brian O'Driscoll, of this team.

O'Connell, like many others in this group, was at a similar make or break point of the campaign this time a year ago, going to Cardiff with a whiff of the Triple Crown in his nostrils, and the renewal of Munster's Magnificent Obsession but a couple of weeks further down the track. A difference, of course, was that the Lions tour provided the summer challenge.

O'Connell wouldn't want this season's climax to pan out like last season's.

He is very much in the vanguard of the still relatively new phenomenon that is the Irish professional rugby player. Winning may not quite be everything, but it's a big part of the deal.

So much to win, so much to lose. O'Connell makes the point that 12 months on, Ireland are not facing a home team with a four-from-four record and within touching distance of a first Grand Slam in 27 years, a team with momentum. That said and done, he's not having the notion that England are bedraggled and there for the taking.

"One thing that struck me on the Lions tour, and surprised me, was how much the English players rely on passion. It's reckoned to be a Celtic thing, but they were just as reliant on passion for the big games. That's why I think they'll be a completely different proposition than they've been for their last two games."

"If you look at their four matches in Twickenham this season, they pushed the All Blacks very close, they beat Australia, they beat Samoa and they hockeyed Wales. At Twickenham, they have been close to top form and I've no doubt that it will be unbelievably tough for us, as it is for any team going there."

O'Connell says he and the Irish squad have been bracing themselves from the very start of the week for what might well be the most physical match he has ever played in.

"If we are to have any chance we will have to match their intensity and passion, which for an Irish team playing in England shouldn't be a problem, and if we do that we have what it takes outside to beat them."

With regard to fronting up physically, it would be a stunning surprise if O'Connell fell short in any way. That comes with the package, every time, as it did even on what was an eye-opening Lions tour for him, and one which came with criticism and disappointment.

"At the time, the defeats coloured your perception of it. But the more I look back on it now the more I realised how much I enjoyed the whole experience, and how much I enjoyed the rugby too. I enjoyed the people, and I enjoyed digging deep. The harder it got, the harder I worked."

He talks of listening to and observing the many on-field leaders there were on the Lions tour, of coaching and management initiatives that were either "brilliant" or "definitely not the way forward". He is not inclined to be specific, in part because he can't be. With experience comes knowledge, and one of the net results is he finds himself now talking in a dressingroom or on the pitch in ways he wouldn't have before.

Although he is, by nature, hard on himself because he sets exacting standards, O'Connell strikes a fair balance in his analysis of his own performances on that Lions tour, when he dug deeper than most but it just so happened that some of his mistakes happened in obvious, higher-profile moments.

O'Connell doesn't beat himself over the head about his own level of performance last summer. "I knew that at the time. I did some of the simple things badly and some of the hardest things well, I did them better than ever in my career. But I've no problem criticising myself. And the higher up you go, the more confidence you get and the more you realise you can play at that level."

He takes pride in that he played every minute of all three Tests, and also whenever he looks at pictures of himself and Donncha O'Callaghan either packing down together or alongside each other in Lions shirts.

"It's kind of weird. When you get picked on a Lions tour you're amongst the cream of players from England, Scotland and Wales, and there was myself and Donners, two secondrows who had played together at 19 for the Munster under-20s. That's kinda cool."

As with other Munster players who've progressed through to the Irish ranks - Peter Clohessy, Alan Quinlan, Denis Leamy and others - O'Connell could be a bit of a firebrand in his formative years. In his barnstorming days at Young Munster, O'Connell incurred more than his fair share of yellow cards as well as a ridiculously high strike rate of tries.

So, typical of the innate self-discipline and the devotion which was essential for his once promising swimming career, he simply deduced he wasn't being much use to his team-mates by too often spending 10 minutes in the sinbin, and resolved to curb his aggressive excesses. Just the excesses, mind.

O'Connell is a voracious reader of all things sporting, and has a voracious appetite for self-improvement. So the Lions odyssey, and watching New Zealand players up close and personal in their command of the basic skills no matter the position, made him resolve to improve his footwork and ball-handling skills.

The advent of a skills' coach, Tony McGahan, at Munster, for example, was something he warmly welcomed, even if thus far he's had to rely on "very positive feedback" from provincial team-mates, as the nature of his season has limited his involvement with Munster.

On the face of it, suffering a broken hand in the teething stages of the season, which sidelined him for three months, was an ill-timed blow but, again, he resolved to make the most of it. "It gave me the opportunity to do some great work on my fitness and speed, which I hadn't been able to do in a long time. The injury wasn't planned, but in some ways I turned it to my advantage."

He's returned to a more callow side. With many of the more experienced leaders making way, and an attempted change in playing style, O'Connell says everyone has had to assume more of a leadership role as a result, not just himself.

"People come and go but the rugby team has to go on. It's like when Woody was in the team for years, but then along came Shane Byrne and did a great job, making it onto the Lions Test team four years after Woody. And now along comes Jerry Flannery, getting rave reviews and doing fabulous work.

"Players come and player go, rugby is like that unfortunately."

He enjoys being one of the team leaders, he says, and would be inclined to talk a lot on the pitch anyway. He admits to being spurred on by the few occasions he's been made captain of country or province. And he's had some great role models.

"You look at all these different styles of leaders. Axel (Anthony Foley) is totally unlike Gaillimh (Mick Galwey), even though he probably learnt everything he knows from Gaillimh.

"Drico has his way, Jim Williams his. You take a little bit from all these guys. For example, if Gaillimh had us back in our half after scoring, he would often tell Frankie to talk, I guess because he trusted Frankie's passion and felt he shouldn't do all the talking himself."

In a similar way, O'Driscoll regards O'Connell as one of his trusted lieutenants. "He's one of the major senior figures in the team now. I think he's realised that's expected of him now, that he's the talisman in the pack and that when he speaks, people tend to listen to him," says O'Driscoll.

"When you put in performances like his week in week out, you get a lot more prestige from your team-mates, and they want to follow you that little bit more. He has that little bit of roughness in him, which you need on a rugby pitch. That's just under his skin, and knowing he's going to speak, I just leave that up to him.

"What you don't always get from him vocally, you're guaranteed to get in the passionate way he plays and sometimes that's the best way to lead teams, and he's certainly done that any time he's pulled on an Irish jersey this year. He's just so confrontational. He feels he can take on the world. I mightn't be of the same opinion, I prefer to try and run around people rather than through them, but each to their own," says O'Driscoll, and smiling.

A nation is expectant today, but O'Connell says that is a good pressure to have. This is why O'Connell plays rugby and these are potentially the golden years. Winning another Triple Crown on its own, for all its mystical values, wouldn't come close to completely sating his ambitious any more than it did two years ago.

"Somebody asked me if I had achieved everything I wanted to yet," he mentions, which on the face of it hardly reflects much understanding of the man. "I haven't achieved anything yet. With the quality of players we have now, we want to win Triple Crowns, sure, but we want to win championships and Grand Slams too, and believe it or not, World Cups. At the end of our careers, when we look back, if we haven't won something substantial, and more than once, we'll be disappointed."