"I still want to captain England"

Strauss is not a tub-thumper, a heart-on-the-sleeve patriot. He is most unlikely to ask the tattooist to dip his needle in the ink and give him a coronet and three lions.

"I like to think I'm a pretty laid-back kind of guy" is Strauss's assessment of his own character. In the dressing room before an innings his motivational talk to himself goes something like this: Look, I know this is important but I'm still going to wake up tomorrow morning if I get a duck.

"He likes quality and he wants quality people around him," says Ian Gould, who coached Strauss when he joined the Middlesex 2nd XI in 1996. "He's not stupid. I reckon if he hadn't become a Test player he'd have packed it in by now and gone and done something that interested him."

It is the end of an English summer. Strauss is sitting on the patio of a discreetly luxurious hotel near Wimbledon Common. Down shallow stone steps the lawns pour into the distance. The cutlery on nearby tables chimes a self-confident note on the crockery. Andrew Flintoff mischievously and inaccurately used to accuse Strauss of being a practising aristocrat. If he was here now, he would probably be asking with an evil grin if the gardens were bigger or smaller than Strauss's own.

Strauss talks as he bats - well organised, fluent but giving little away, rarely flash, occasionally defensive. If he gets a question he is not comfortable with, his reply begins automatically with the word "Look", as in "look here". It is a trigger response, characteristically Australian and possibly taught at a Team England 'Managing the Media' session. When asked to name some of the "intellectual tests" of being a captain, "talking to reporters, doing press conferences, not getting caught out too often" comes high on the list.

First, though, he speaks about looking forward to the Ashes and dwells on the issue of mental strength. He says that during the Ashes in 2005 the sense of expectation, the intensity of the cricket, the pressure, was something he had never experienced before. "You are tested more in an Ashes series than in any other because Australia are the best team in the world," he says. "Playing them is the biggest mental task you can take on. It was certainly very foreign to me last year because it was so different from any other series I'd played in. But the most important thing is to enjoy the challenge, enjoy taking these guys on and think of the upside: 'I might get a hundred here; think how great that'll be.' It's about becoming psychologically mature. I don't think there was a particular moment for me; it was more of a general evolution. I remember early in my Middlesex career I was all over the shop mentally."

The cure for that fragility was Strauss's decision to get a sweat on in the gym. "I put a lot of time and effort into getting very fit, so I was prepared and, when I went out to bat, I felt I deserved to do well. That was the first step. Then it was generally a case of growing up." "When he first came to us," says Gould with a chuckle of recollection, "he thought he was in really good shape until we took him on a pretty full-on training session and he strained virtually every muscle he had in his body. He knew then he wasn't as fit as he thought he was."

Strauss survived his beasting by Gunner Gould in a school sports hall somewhere in west London. Other tests were passed out in the middle. "I remember facing Allan Donald in a game against Warwickshire for the first time and that took me very much out of my comfort zone. I got 80-odd on a quick wicket. It was a real eye opener and I thought, 'OK, so that's what Test cricket is about.' I'd got through it and that gave me confidence to go on." One of the most recognisable signs of Australian confidence is the traditional pre-Ashes squawk of the country's oldest cricketing bird, the McGrath Cockatoo. "Five-nil! Five-nil! Glennie want a cracker! Five-nil!"

Once again the fast bowler has not disappointed, though it seems a bit daft, given what happened last time. No one in the England team would do that sort of thing, would they?

"Well," says Strauss, laughing, "Kevin Pietersen might do it. I think it's a cultural thing; I think we're more understated in the way we go about things. And personally I think it doesn't help your cause. We took a conscious decision before the last Ashes series to do most of our talking on the pitch and that's the way it should be. Australians motivate themselves differently.

"I think it's a dangerous area. If you're going to play that game, you've got to be very confident in what you're trying to achieve. It's my view that coming out and saying those things in the press becomes a distraction to the cricket and a distraction to the team. So I don't think it's helpful."

So do England not have that sort of confidence?

Strauss frowns. A trigger movement is approaching. "Look. I never said it was to do with confidence. That's completely wrong. I think you can be very confident that you're going to win 5-0 but you don't have to go out and say it. That is only going to put more pressure on you. We are still a very confident side. If you look at our results since the last Ashes, we slipped up in Pakistan. We played poor cricket there and it was the end of a long season and we didn't do ourselves justice. The India tour we lost our captain and our vice-captain without a ball being bowled. We drew 1-1 there, which even took Australia a while to achieve. And then we came back and played a lot of excellent cricket this summer. There's still confidence in our Test cricket."

In a quiet moment Strauss may have allowed himself a fond daydream which featured him leading out the England side at Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide. But here in Wimbledon it is two days after he was told that, despite his efforts leading England against Sri Lanka in the one-day series and against Pakistan in the Tests and ODIs, it would be Flintoff taking charge in Australia. "Commiserations," is all I can think to say. "I didn't expect it." "Well, I'm sorry to have disappointed you," he says with a deadpan smile.

He had been told of the decision at the ECB's cricket centre in Loughborough at the beginning of the week, which must have made the "Are you going to get it?" interviews he did afterwards, before the decision was announced publicly, rather difficult. He will not say what Fletcher said to him - "Those sort of conversations are private and should remain so. It wasn't a massive, long discussion. I'd known from previous talks with him and the selectors that it was going to be a tough call" - and insists it was flattering to be asked to do the job in the first place.

Neither was he crushed by the decision, he says. He did not feel that sense of rejection often experienced after an unsuccessful job interview. "I didn't feel that at all. There was no indication at any stage from the selectors or Duncan that I had done anything glaringly wrong or had been inadequate in any way. So I was quite comfortable in what I had achieved with the team."

Strauss's diplomacy about the recent past is only to be expected and sounds genuine. But when he speaks about the future he is more forthright. "I still harbour ambitions of captaining England and whether that happens soon or in a while or never at all I still have that ambition. But right at this time it's not significant to me. Fred leads from the front and I will do everything I can to help him. If I've got suggestions and feel I can contribute, I will do."

At least Strauss was not wasting his time when he read Mike Brearley's The Art of Captaincy. "Yeah, I've done that. I've read it more than once actually. I think I read it when I became a school captain and when I took over at Middlesex.

One of the points he made in that book is that you have to be your own man and true to your character. You can't do things that are unnatural because people will see through you. There's no point me dancing and jumping around the dressing room like Fred might do because that's not my way." Instead Strauss in the dressing room is a man of the well-chosen sentence. "I like to think that I don't say anything unless it's reasonably sensible. So I think I've got the respect of the guys in that, when I do speak, it's worth listening. Like Fred I also believe in leading through example. That's why it's important to get runs as a captain. But off the pitch little things are important too - training, fielding practice, whatever, turning up to functions on time. Those things are important for a captain. That's my style."

It was not always that way.

"Whoever made him captain at Middlesex changed his life," says Graeme Fowler, the England batsman who coached Strauss at Durham University. "Because once he was captain he had to wake up and start playing well and he found a method and then he started scoring runs." Fowler says Strauss did not have the mark of greatness at university. In fact he was often 12th man for the British Universities side and batted at seven when he did get a game. "What he did have was an unbelievably calm temperament. But he was that calm he was asleep," says Fowler. "I'll tell you a classic Straussy story.

"We were in the pavilion and was he was sitting with his pads on, his back to the game and we were at a table chatting. A wicket went down, so Straussy got his bat and walked in, on strike at the far end. He hit his first ball to midwicket and set off. I could see the fielder thinking 'What's he doing?' He lobbed the ball to the bowler, who calmly removed the bails, and Straussy just kept running, past the stumps, past the incoming batsman and straight back to his stool where we'd been talking.

"He sat down and said: 'Where were we?' I was flabbergasted, speechless with laughter. About 20 minutes later he said: 'Foxy, I do apologise. I don't think I was truly awake.'"

Fowler laughs fondly. He likes Strauss. "Brilliant lad. The higher up he's gone, the more it's woken him up. Test cricket is the right mental level of game for Straussy. Test cricket is a mental game and it suits him."

Nothing wakes up an English cricketer like the prospect of five Ashes Tests in Australia. Strauss is wide-eyed when he says this contest will be harder than the last but he does not accept that this means England will not win this time.

"No, it's not less likely. I think Australia are going to be very up for this and that could enable them either to play out of their skins, or not as well as they'd like to, because of the expectation and wanting it too badly. We believe we know how to beat Australia but we'll have to play exceptionally well to do it."

He says all this with a measure of calmness that Fowler would appreciate. ("You'll never find him in nightclubs" is another Fowler observation. "He didn't even go to them when he was a student. Fantastic dry sense of humour, though.")

So Strauss has no time for nightclubs and can also do without cricket's pre-occupation with tradition and the men who made the game great. He wrinkles his nose in displeasure when asked if he felt the weight of history when he was England captain. Hutton, May, Illingworth, Brearley, Strauss?

"Look, that's never interested me. People come out with these stats and say, 'Did you know that you're the leading runscorer on a cloudy Tuesday' or whatever. I don't understand that. I do understand, though, the honour of playing for England, of captaining England and everything that goes with it."

England supporters can ask for little more. Come the Ashes, Strauss will be out in the middle - well-organised, fluent, giving little away, rarely flash, occasionally defensive. His wedding ring will be around his neck on a shoelace as it always is because he is so absent-minded he fears he will lose it in the dressing room.

We can ask for little more. Well, perhaps one thing: week after week of cloudy Tuesdays?