Super Bowl 2022: LA Rams face Cincinnati Bengals - your guide to NFL showpiece

One way or another, it's going to be a Hollywood ending to an enthralling NFL season with Super Bowl 56 set to provide either the final act of a true underdog story or the completion of an ambitious all-star gamble.

The Los Angeles Rams went all-in in assembling an all-star cast to make sure they played the Super Bowl in their magnificent new home stadium, but nobody was expecting the Cincinnati Bengals, 125-1 outsiders at the start of the season, to be lining up against them.

With another bumper set of all-stars set to make the half-time show a blockbuster too, it's all set up to be a night like no other in Los Angeles.

Absolutely nobody fancied the Bengals, with just six wins in two previous seasons combined, to make it this far — and in fact no team has ever had a worse record in the two years before making the Super Bowl.

But this year it all clicked. With second-year quarterback Joe Burrow reunited with college team-mate Ja'Marr Chase, the Bengals have been an attacking team full of highlight-reel big plays.

Burrow and Chase aside, the Bengals have a squad more in keeping with a low-key franchise that has never won the Super Bowl, and went 31 years without even winning a play-off game until this season.

By contrast, since the Rams moved back to LA from St Louis in 2016 they've really taken the Hollywood theme to heart, embarking on an ambitious plan of blockbuster trades to bring in established star players in vital positions.

They have played four Super Bowls in their 86-year history — having started life in Cleveland in 1936, they moved to LA in the 1940s, and to St Louis in the mid-90s, before returning to LA — but have won only one, in 2000.

They have now put down permanent roots in the City of Angels. Owner Stan