Owen Smith proved himself a left wing candidate in the first hustings – but beating Jeremy Corbyn will be an uphill struggle

Tonight showed the scale of the challenge for Owen Smith’s attempt to unseat Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.

Following his huge victory last year, and the enormous rise in party membership as a direct result of it, Corbyn starts this Labour leadership contest as firm favourite – he could be on for an even bigger win this September.

So the six leadership hustings scheduled to take place, which will all be streamed live online, are of vital importance to Owen Smith. Smith’s pitch is that he has the same radical edge as Corbyn, but is more competent, media friendly and capable of taking Labour into Government. He has been pushing for more hustings, especially televised hustings, but at the moment it looks unlikely we’ll get more than the ones already pencilled in. It’s in these few bouts that he will really have to make his mark with undecided voters, many of whom won’t know much about him.

The pressure, then, was on the Pontypridd MP this evening, as we saw the first head-to-head of the campaign with an hour and forty five minute debate in Cardiff.

Smith performed well, hitting the right tone on treading the line between his policy announcements on public investment and the need for Labour to be seen as a government-in-waiting.

But Corbyn – who has been in his element in recent weeks, using his well-attended rallies across the country as a warm up for the campaign – was on top of his arguments, and made his pitch well too. Smith will struggle to make headway while the Labour leader looks comfortable.

On Trident, one of Corbyn’s passions, he received raucous applause for his commitment to unilateral disarmament. The South Wales audience did the unthinkable and groaned as Smith invoked Nye Bevan in his own multilateral argument.

Corbyn also went hard on distancing himself from Labour under Ed Miliband, saying “we were not an anti-austerity party” going into the 2015 election. “It’s not good enough to go on the doorstep and say we’ll have less cuts than they will, that we’ll be austerity-lite,” he said, to further applause.

Smith, meanwhile, was convincing on his bid to be seen as a left winger but, as his supporters are pointing out, agreeing with Jeremy will not deliver him victory. It is only on the dividing lines where he might be able to start shifting votes in his favour.

Raising concerns about the party looking “more disunited” now brought vocal dissent within the room – but that may have served to reinstate his point for members watching at home. He also raised the what he saw as the rising problem of anti-Semitism within Labour, which again received audible groans from the audience.

The two campaigns, though, both feel they found a winning point in their opponent’s comments this evening.

For Owen Smith, it was on Corbyn’s supposed failure during the EU referendum to make a strong enough case for Remain – and his claim not to have called for the immediate triggering of Article 50 has already been turned into a short attack video. This could prove effective with an assiduously pro-EU selectorate in the Labour Party.

Corbyn’s attack line may still prove more pointed, however. His backers are tonight arguing that their man spoke of the need to build a social movement as well as a government-in-waiting – and that in the closing statements Corbyn spoke of what “we” can achieve while Smith spoke of his personal qualities. It will take a lot to counter that narrative.