AFC Championship Game: Final instalment of the Tom Brady vs Peyton Manning show poised to grip America

Let’s hear it for the old guys. Sunday is championship round Sunday in the NFL playoffs and for the first time since 2004 the top two seeds in each conference, the league’s four best regular-season teams, do battle for a place in the Super Bowl. A rich feast of football is predicted, after a distinctly non-vintage NFL year. But forget the details, that the near-perfect Carolina Panthers and the Arizona Cardinals are meeting in the NFC title game, while the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos face each other for the AFC crown. Only one thing matters this weekend. For what surely will be the last time, it’s Tom Brady versus Peyton Manning.

They are of course the two greatest quarterbacks of their era. Who’s better? The Broncos’ Manning if statistics are the measure of excellence; Brady if you go by the four Super Bowl rings won by New England in the 14 years he has been their starting quarterback, and by head-to-head match-ups between the pair.

They have faced each other 16 times, and 11 times Brady has emerged victorious – though Manning has won two of their three meetings in the championship round. Only the accident that both have played their entire careers in the AFC has prevented them from facing each other on the biggest stage of all, the Super Bowl.

On paper, and if the regular season is a guide, Brady-Manning 17 is a mismatch. At 39, Manning is entering Brett Favre territory. He’s close on 40 (Favre finally retired at 41) and coming off his worst NFL season, in which he’s been injured, benched in favour of his back-up, and linked to a performance-enhancing drug scandal (which he denies).

True, there were glimpses of the old imperious Manning in Denver’s 23-16 division round win last Sunday over the Pittsburgh Steelers. But only glimpses, and this surely is his play-offs swansong.

At 38, Brady is also getting on. But he’s playing with the cold fury of a slighted man – which he believes he was in the “Deflategate” debacle that cost him a four-game suspension by the NFL, later revoked by the courts. That dust-up of course did not stop the Patriots, gridiron’s answer to the New York Yankees, from winning Super Bowl XLIX.

But what better revenge than a second straight title, which would simultaneously deliver a stinging slap to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and seal the place of Brady and the Patriots as the NFL’s player and team of the 21st century?

Manning’s chances of outduelling Brady are even dimmer now that the Patriots’ tight end Rob Gronkowski and wide receiver Julian Edelman are fit. The Broncos’ best hope is that their defence, the NFL’s best, will get to Brady before he gets to them. And maybe it will.

In truth, though, Brady and Manning are probably only the third and fourth best quarterbacks in action this weekend. Pride of place must go to the Panthers’ Cam Newton, to no one’s surprise named this week as the league’s regular season MVP.

“Carolina who?” sniffed the prognosticators before the 2015 season. Then the Panthers compiled a 15-1 record behind Newton’s 45 touchdowns (35 thrown, 10 rushing) before defeating the Seattle Seahawks, who featured in the last two Super Bowls, in the divisional round. At 26, Newton’s a mere lad. Come 2026, he may share a pedestal with Brady and Manning.

And then there’s Carson Palmer of the Cardinals, perhaps the NFL’s strongest all-round team. After 13 years in the NFL, with three different teams and much disappointment, Palmer followed a dazzling season with a first-ever play-off victory against Green Bay last weekend. The head may say Brady versus Newton in the Super Bowl, but the heart says Manning against Palmer.