Johnny Watterson talks to Ulster flanker Neil Best who is candid about the physical side of rugby

Tagging Neil Best can be difficult. He has been described as candid and unaffected. He's not a rugby academy boy, and Best didn't come through the ranks, but hit the game of rugby at 19 in Malone and, at 26, now looks towards his first start in an Irish shirt.

Best has had his troubles, looked at them hard and learned from them. An altercation outside a nightclub last January, after which he was arrested, has scarred him, made him revise his attitude.

"My whole outlook has changed this past 10 months," says the blindside flanker. "I don't feel pressure at all now. Things just happen to you. It's so weird. Even in my personal life, when things happen they just wash over me. It's not a good thing, but playing stuff like this (international match) there are maybe 30,000 people watching. I don't really think about it at all. I went through a bit of a personal problem in January. My outlook sort of stemmed from that."

A hard-man image on and off the pitch has been dumped in this year's Pauline conversion. But Best still talks pragmatic, combative rugby very well indeed. If you want a flavour of the trenches, the number six can deliver with a wonderfully, unrestrained zest.

But Best also trusts. He trusts that you understand what he actually means is sometimes figurative. He trusts that you understand the coded language of the locker-room and accept there is a hard edge of the game.

"Players I admire?" he says. "Probably one of the South African backrows. Andre Venter. I used to love watching him because he was an absolute . . . he'd just run in. I remember him stamping on Tim Roper. It was brilliant.

"I just used to love all that really dirty stuff. I can't get involved in it now. It gets picked up so quickly. You just get a bad name for yourself and people think you're some sort of loose cannon.

"Sometimes a bit of stamping and a bit of shoeing has to go on. If you're the only one doing it on the team you look like the worst person in the world. But if everybody's doing it then it seems to be okay, which is weird."

This is not the bland answer you have come to expect. This is like New Zealand frontrow Anton Oliver being asked on BBC recently what he thought when outhalf Dan Carter first arrived in the Kiwi camp. "Thought he was a pretty boy poofter," offered the All Black. Some answers you just don't anticipate. Best has more.

"I think your forward pack has got to be physically nasty, dominant and proper hard men," he says. "You're going up against big French packs and they don't take any s**** from anybody and they'll kick the absolute living s**** out of you. If there is just one of you doing it then it's a hard day at the office, coz you're just getting your head kicked off you.

"Maybe that's what happened in the last few years. I got singled out as being some sort of loose cannon or screwball because I'd been annoyed and frustrated about how we were getting bullied. Now we've got players like Justin Harrison, big Roger Wilson. These guys are physically strong and hard. They won't take a back step against anybody and that means I can concentrate on sneaking one-yard tries."

Ulster coach Mark McCall and his predecessor, South African Andre Bester, are the individuals Best believes have given his game a more thoughtful, technical edge. His running lines and effectiveness have at least attracted Eddie O'Sullivan enough to throw him in against a Romanian pack that plies its trade in France.

With boyish enthusiasm, Best says what his pack members think. He's not the voice of restraint, but his resonating tales of action and his visceral honesty bear little malevolence.

"I'm a happy man if I come off the pitch not injured and the players around me are not injured and the opposition are not injured," he says.

He's come a long way since being thrown into the mix in Malone as a 12½-stone teenager. "I'm reading the game a bit better now, which I think is important," he says.

"I'm getting older now and I don't want to be running around like a blue-arsed fly chasing things I shouldn't be. I can do better things than running about like an eejit all day."

And for Ulster he has done.