Guinness Six Nations: Ireland v England Venue: Aviva Stadium Date: Saturday, 2 February Kick-off: 16:45 GMT Coverage: Live on BBC Radio 5 live and Radio Ulster, plus live text commentary & highlights on the BBC Sport website.

The finest players in the world do not excel in glorious isolation. They drag the best from those around them, demand that others match their standards, stand on the field as the epitome of what their coach wants the entire team to be.

On Saturday in Dublin, Owen Farrell and Johnny Sexton will be in opposition, the two most pivotal players in the most critical position of all. But the two are more about a shared ethos and ability than enmity and antagonism, members of a mutual appreciation society that will express itself in the most brutal terms come late afternoon.

Both leaders, both ferocious competitors. Both cantankerous and habitually dissatisfied. Intensely private off the pitch but relentlessly vocal on it.

The easy angle is to ask which is the better player: the Irishman who has scored 738 points and nine tries across his 78 caps, or the Englishman who has 726 points in 65 with nine tries.

The more enlightening, as those stats suggest, is less to denigrate one through praise for the other than wonder which parts you would take from each to create the perfect northern hemisphere fly-half.

You might start with Sexton's kicking from hand and Farrell's from the tee, and call as recent evidence the bomb that led to Garry Ringrose's early try in the reverse fixture a year ago and Farrell's excellence against the All Blacks, Springboks and Wallabies in November - except you would then have to reference Farrell's grubber kick for Elliot Daly's try in that same match at Twickenham, and Sexton's 100% kick success in Ireland's famous defeat of New Zealand.

Ireland-England game will not be boring - Schmidt

You might favour Farrell's blind-side-like tackling, thinking of how he routinely stops far bigger men in their tracks, but you would have to look back at the stats from last year's Six Nations, when Farrell may have made more than half as many tackles again as Sexton but missed 17 to the Irishman's six, and ask a little about the low-arm technique he sometimes employs.

Sexton cajoles referees. Farrell interrogates them. Sexton gets targeted physically by the opposition, Farrell temperamentally.

You'd look at Sexton's ability to put players away with a short inside pass or run the loop around the man on his outside, but also how Farrell takes the ball up so tight to the defensive line, of how three of his tries have come in the past 12 months when Sexton's last came against Canada all the way back in September 2015.

Neither is Beauden Barrett, who at the last count had a remarkable 32 international tries, more than any other fly-half in history. Not often will you see either dancing through gaps that few others saw.

That is absolutely fine, because they have a strength and steadfastness that the quicksilver Kiwi does not always display. Just as Barrett represents the defining characteristics of how the three-time world champions play, so Farrell and Sexton personify how Eddie Jones and Joe Schmidt hope to dethrone them.

It may not always look pretty. The smiles may come later. As injured England centre Ben Te'o says: "You've got one cranky guy on the other side and one cranky guy on our side."

But it will be hard, nasty, unrelenting. The team on Saturday that most effectively subdues the opposition 10 will most likely come out on top.

Sexton is the more secure in his position, if only because of the respective alternatives at Jones and Schmidt's disposal. It is slightly strange to think that when Farrell started at 10 against South Africa in the first of last autumn's internationals, it was only the third time he had played there under Jones. The last time England played in Dublin, Farrell was playing outside his old mate George Ford.

Yet as this September's World Cup sharpens Jones' mind, Farrell has begun to own centre stage. Undisputed first-choice fly-half. Captain on his own now, no longer sharing a prefix with Dylan Hartley. First man out, last man considered for the hook.

Sexton is 34 in July, half a decade older than Farrell. When they first met on the pitch, at Twickenham seven years ago, it was about establishing a pecking order: Farrell twice holding Sexton down on the deck, Sexton laughing and telling him that just because his father Andy was a hard man that didn't make him one too.

A year later it was about establishing trust and a friendship based on respect. The two were room-mates on the 2013 Lions tour, the only two specialist fly-halves in the squad. Sexton claimed Farrell as an honorary Irishman.

Four years on they came together on the pitch in the second Test to snatch a win off the All Blacks and combined again to secure a draw in the third that would tie the series, two of the critical characters in a plot-twist that few saw coming.

They talked rugby long after others had grown tired of it. They learned from each other and they fed off each other's finer points too: the energy each brought to training, the rigour under heavy fire in matches, the killer look aimed at their team-mates if anyone felt short of what they expected.

You could ask whose side would miss them more.

Usually the answer is Sexton's, the case study being how their last World Cup campaign fell apart, although that defeat by Argentina was also in the absence of Paul O'Connell, Peter O'Mahony, Sean O'Brien and Jared Payne, and back-up Joey Carbery has flourished since his summer move to Munster.

And while Ford has proved himself at international level, the last time Farrell was left out of his nation's starting XV, England were 15-10 down at home to Japan at half-time. With Farrell on in the second period, they scored 25 unanswered points.

And so we come to this weekend, Sexton making his first start since the end of December but the reigning World Rugby Player of the Year, a man whose year included a holy trinity of European Champions Cup, Guinness Pro14 title and a Six Nations Grand Slam; Farrell making his comeback from a thumb operation after an autumn spent resuscitating Jones' labouring England team.

For once, the stats appear heavily in one man's favour. England have not won in the Six Nations in Dublin since 2013, and have only one victory there in the old tournament since the Grand Slam of 2003. They have failed to even score a try there in their last 240 minutes of action.

Almost no-one wins away in the Six Nations any more. If you ignore struggling Italy, only Ireland won on the road last year; the year before, only England did so, and then just once.

And yet Farrell will believe he has the edge. Four times he has started at fly-half for England against Sexton. Three times he has walked off the pitch victorious. Sexton has won five but lost six against England.

There is so little between them but there is everything to admire. Rivals but complementary, there to be celebrated as much as contrasted.