Gerry Thornley talks to the fiery flanker who learned to 'curb the beast' and earn his place in the Ireland set-up

Wednesday is generally a day off, and Neil Best likes to pick out a recipe, maybe from a provincial French cuisine book, Gordon Ramsey's dessert book, or whatever. He'll clean up his kitchen, make out his list of ingredients, head to the supermarket, return and lay everything out. He could spend the whole day cooking his chosen meal, assiduously following the instructions on the premise that if he does that, he'll rarely go wrong.

"I might cook eight ramekins of crème brulee, offer one to somebody, and like: 'what am I going to do with the other seven?' I just eat them. I'm lucky, I have a very sweet tooth but I don't put on weight and I like learning about food and learning how to cook it well."

Best reckons he'd eat most people under the table and devours his rugby with the same enthusiasm. Bearded and long-haired, looking almost like a young George Best, he brings the same kind of irreverent, refreshing, slightly unreconstructed approach to his interviews as he does to the playing field. And his late-developing, circuitous career path could be an inspiration to many out there who haven't taken the more direct route via an elite rugby playing school.

There is no trace of rugby in the family bloodline and he went to a hockey playing school, Wellington College. Not that he was particularly good, by his own admission.

"I would say I was competitive and fairly athletic, and wouldn't capitulate, but I wouldn't have been a very skilful hockey player.

"I was more like at the back, chopping people in half when they were coming at me."

A stopper?

"Yeah, a chopper at the back."

He did play rugby on the Wellington College first team, but their relative strength pitted them against the likes of Methody's Fourths. His enthusiasm for the game grew, and at 16, he started combining schools games on Wednesdays by playing with Malone on Saturdays.

He takes his sports seriously, and at Queen's University (he has a BSc in chemical engineering to go with his MA) he combined rugby with rowing. Great conditioning training, and he was told he could have gone far.

"The trainer, Paddy Docherty, told me that if I had kept it on board I could have gone to the Commonwealth Games with Ireland. I was the fittest and I was beating most of the guys who had been doing it for two or three years. There were only about three or four people ahead of me in the whole rowing club."

Whereas rowing is more cardiovascular-based, he needed to bulk up for rugby, and after two years combining the two he abandoned his fledgling rowing career. At 22, he decided to join Belfast Harlequins, which created what he describes as quite a kerfuffle in Malone.

"When you're banging your head off a brick wall, and you feel that maybe others aren't taking it as seriously, you have to move to somewhere where others are taking it as seriously. You play better with better players, and Harlequins were a better team at that stage," he reasons, quite matter-of-factly.

Relegated in his first year, Harlequins won Division Two in his second year under the idiosyncratic, infectiously enthusiastic Andre Bester. Few players under his charge don't have a strongly held opinion about the engaging South African, and Best is a fan.

"He coached more the mechanics of the game. People say a lot of things about him but he's a bloody good coach, and I respected him and I think he respected me because I listened to him. That was when things started to happen for me."

A turning point in his career was an in-house Ulster trial arranged by Alan Solomons five years ago. Ulster were short of backrowers and his then Harlequins team-mate Clem Boyd recommended they have a look at Best. So impressed was Solomons by Best's 40 minutes on the pitch, he immediately had him sign a development contract.

"He's a great coach," Best says of Solomons. "He's a fantastic man-manager, he's honest and he calls a spade a spade. He stuck by me and I appreciated that because I was very raw and green at that stage. I was very enthusiastic but maybe not channelled in the right places. He was very influential."

Best was undoubtedly a bit of a firebrand. "Because I was so slight I felt as though I had to make up for it. It's like if you lose your sight your hearing becomes super-human, or your smell, so I had to make up for this with aggression. I was a young man then, so I've mellowed a wee bit since then, thank goodness."

He has learnt how to "cage the beast" as he self-deprecatingly puts it, last season incurring only one yellow card, and none this season.

The Ulster rejuvenation has emulated the old Munster adage that if the team goes well collectively, individually the rewards will come too.

"That first year with Smally (Mark McCall) and Clarkey (Allen Clarke) wasn't so good, but I wasn't too worried because there was always going to be a transition. If we had done badly again in the second year I probably wouldn't be sitting here."

A year ago, in the first of the November Tests, he made his Irish debut. In the 76th minute he replaced Simon Easterby with the All Blacks leading 38-0. Soon it would be 45-0. Welcome to Test rugby.

"I got nine minutes, I think. I was right beside Marcus (Horan) when he scored because I remember thinking: 'that would have been nice if I'd snuck in there'," he recalls with a smile.

"I knew at that stage the best thing I could do was not make any more mistakes. At that stage you just have to set your hair on fire and run about and try and do something."

Despite "the hockeying" he enjoyed the experience; the haka, the post-match dinner, being presented with his cap and a fortnight later he marked his full debut by scoring Ireland's second try 35 minutes in against Romania.

"D'Arce (Gordon D'Arcy) took a wide ball off the scrumhalf, hared up toward the line, did a bit of footwork and I came from behind him and caught the offload. The fullback came across but he was only a pup. He was 19 and quite slight, and he sort of fell off my left leg and I then just sat it down. Then it was hugs."

Missing out on the Six Nations, Easterby's absence from the summer tour afforded him another opportunity, which he grasped with both hands, starting in all three Tests. Hence, of his first seven caps, six will have been against the Tri-Nations heavyweights.

He didn't feel out of his depth, and physically has since gone up from 101 kgs to 105kgs.

"I thought I was there or thereabouts at the breakdown, made my tackles and lots of other stuff."

And if you can hold your own at the breakdown against Richie McCaw and co, you can do it against anybody. He seems to have the necessary attitude.

"You just have to fire yourself in. Hopefully, you don't lose your head and get your face busted in."

Like the rest of the team, pushing the almighty Blacks to two tight wins has infused him with confidence.

"I was just saying to some of the boys the other day 'imagine if we had beaten those All Blacks we would have been absolute legends'. I can't stop thinking about it. Forget about it," he says, shaking his head in mock madness.

Glad to have beaten the Springboks, the challenge now is to show it wasn't a one-off. Superb and diligently legal in his counter-rucking last week, when always coming through the gate, now he's up against Phil Waugh and co, with George Smith on the bench.

He points out that although they're not as big as the Boks, the Wallabies backrowers are bulkier men, quicker to the breakdown and their lower centre of gravity enables them to contest the ball better when they get there.

Best would love to play in a Six Nations' game, particularly against France at Croke Park. "I've played against France A. They're great to watch, and great to play against. They knock the bag out of you up front, and then you've got all these long-haired, tanned artists in the backline just whipping the ball around like they're in the park with their mates. It's just the contrast between the pack and their flashy backs."

Not that he could look that far ahead. "Not even in rugby, in life in general. I'm always double-booking myself for things. Look, I'm very lucky to be here and anything can happen between now and the Six Nations or the World Cup."

Living the moment, and seizing it.