Giant opportunity for Quins' smart Alex

Showdown with Johnson and Kay brings a World Cup glimmer

Alex Codling gets more line-out ball thrown to him than any one else in the Zurich Premiership. I know this because he told me. "Yes, but occasionally I get marked up and that leaves space available for someone else," the Harlequins lock adds with a grin. "I can be useful as a distraction too."

Codling's enthusiasm is infectious, and not just for rugby. As a teenaged all-rounder, he played a first-class cricket match for Surrey away to Glamorgan; Mark Butcher was a team-mate at youth level and they went to the same school, Trinity in Croydon.

Codling is also a football fan. He recalls when he was 12 and his dad took him down to Selhurst Park for his first Crystal Palace game – "against Birmingham, we won 3-1". He queued in his school uniform for tickets to Palace's 1990 FA Cup final against Manchester United, and the pleasure of securing a Wembley seat was only mildly tempered by the dressing-down from his headmaster after he was spotted on TV missing morning lessons.

At the age of 29, Codling is pleasantly surprised to find himself an overnight success in his chosen sport. He was capped by England only last June, in the win over Argentina in Buenos Aires, but his form since joining Quins in 2000 gives him an outside chance of making the World Cup later this year.

He has seen all sides of the amateur and open eras, having served Wasps, Blackheath, Richmond and Neath. "There is a top echelon of players doing well financially," he said, "but the vast majority have to think carefully about what they will do when they finish. This isn't Footballers' Wives, you know."

Codling does know. He had to leave Richmond when they went bust, and a year later departed Neath for Harlequins when it was feared the Welsh club was going under. It is a tribute to his staying power that he should now be contemplating a place in England's Six Nations squad when they are named this week.

And when Quins host Leicester in Saturday's Powergen Cup quarter-final it is a chance to present his credentials opposite two of his England rivals, Martin Johnson and Ben Kay. "Yeah, I'll be against Ben in the middle, so I'm looking forward to it," Codling said.

"He'll have done his homework, and I will, likewise. I'll look at him and know that he does certain things, and I'll adjust accordingly. You try to think how you can expose a player's weaknesses. If the line-out doesn't function, you won't get your backs going, and the game plan will suffer. If other teams win the ball off you, it gives them a ball against a defence that isn't organised, which is one of the best ways to get over the gain-line."

There is more, much more – enough to fill a second-row coaching manual. Codling talks as well as plays a good game. So too his coach, Mark Evans, who in a variation on Oscar Wilde, admits there is one thing worse than being talked about as a cup side, and that is never to be talked about. Harlequins have beaten Leicester in the cup, at The Stoop, in each of the past two seasons. A capacity 8,500 crowd will be agog at the prospect of a hat-trick; BBC viewers tuning in live and unfamiliar with Codling should think Stephen Tompkinson from Ballykissangel with a scrum cap and a broken nose.

Codling was paired with Kay for England in Argentina. The former sees the latter, together with Johnson and Bath's Danny Grewcock, as "set in stone" for the World Cup, leaving one more place for a second row, possibly not even that, if a utility player is favoured to cover the back five.

For now, the club is the thing, though not even Quins' reputation was any help in the notorious finish to the cup final of 2001 against Newcastle. "I remember it vividly," said Codling, the words battling with each other for air time. "I'd come on as substitute, I remember the ball going into touch, and I was thinking to myself 'This is our throw, this ball's coming to me'. So I was preparing myself mentally for it and was pretty horrified when the touch judge signalled it the other way.

"We lost and it was the most down dressing room I've ever been involved in. It took until some time during the evening for it to sink in. But you find out a lot about yourselves from these things."

Evans' squad have recently been searching their souls for a solution to their poor away form in the Premiership. Ironically, Quins' flirtation with relegation last spring threw the spotlight on Codling's consistency under pressure. He was selected for England's non-cap match against the Barbarians, though there was frustration at the start of this season when a hamstring injury restricted him to a spectator's role at England training sessions.

Nevertheless his progress is a reminder of how Paul Ackford, from modest beginnings at Rosslyn Park, joined Harlequins and late in his career played for England in the World Cup final of 1991.

Codling got a degree in business studies in the days when rugby offered no obvious career path. Now that pay cuts and squad caps are the talk of the training ground, he is ahead of the game in preparing for when the whistle no longer blows.

"I'm trying to look at life after rugby, it's very easy to get in a groove of just training. I do eight to 10 hours a week in an office, helping to market a firm of financial advisers in Wimbledon. It keeps the grey matter moving." You get the feeling that, with Alex Codling, it's never stopped.