"Eli Manning is beginning to resemble one of those baby-face gangsters from the old movies. Kid looks cute from a distance but up close it turns out he's got stubble on his chin and robbery in his eye, and when the adults aren't watching he pulls out a cigar and bag of loot.

You've got to wonder at the buried toughness inside this boyish-looking character, who chooses to live in Hoboken instead of a comfortable suburb. On the surface he seems to be "just a sweet child," as his father Archie describes him. Yet here he is in his second Super Bowl, and all that niceness increasingly looks like a mask for something implacably ambitious."