The invisible man

Jonathan Batty: 'It's something I always wanted to do ... I just didn't expect it to come so quickly' © Getty Images

It's what cricketers call a big ask. To follow one of the most successful county captains. To persuade the senior players to swallow their chagrin at being passed over. To write out a team sheet on which the least famous name may be your own. To work with a prominent manager who was appointed before you met him. Oh, and to keep wicket and probably open the batting. It's a good thing Jonathan Batty describes himself as a positive person.

Surrey may be the only team in the world who could lift two trophies in one season and feel disappointed. Last summer they won the National League and the Twenty20 Cup, but limped in third in the Championship after being on course for their fourth title in five years. The Surrey strut had gone phut. "The dressing-room was flat," says the chief executive, Paul Sheldon.

The reverberations were dramatic. The captain, Adam Hollioake, stepped down, saying he would only play one more season and wanted to concentrate on his benefit. His likely successor, Ian Ward, left to join the new champions Sussex, for reasons that were partly financial and partly mysterious. The manager, Keith Medlycott, quit too, amid reports that some senior players had lost confidence in him. It was the sort of upheaval you associate with relegation.

For the manager's job, Surrey hired a big gun - Steve Rixon, the Australian wicketkeeper who has coached both New Zealand and New South Wales, the Surrey of the southern hemisphere. Rixon had turned counties down before, reportedly Hampshire and Lancashire, but liked Surrey's style, saying they were "a winning club with high expectations".

For the captaincy, Surrey went the other way. Batty is a most untypical Surrey player, a tortoise among hares. He has arrived in the public eye not in a dreamy hour at Lord's, like the late Ben Hollioake, or a splashy first season, like Rikki Clarke, but gradually, by stealth, over a decade. He is about to turn 30, and Surrey are his sixth county. In an all-star team, he has been the player least likely to be talked about. Mission impossible has gone to the invisible man.

A big cricket ground in winter is a strange place to be. The Oval's vast outfield is covered in snow, and the cold air carries no more than a faint trace of the magic of summer. Although the car park is half full, there are few signs of life: the players aren't even on the payroll until April. The only activity is the optional Friday net run by Surrey's batting coach, Alan Butcher, where Batty will join Mark Butcher and Alex Tudor.

Batty trots into reception alone, wearing a navy Nike tracksuit and an air of fresh-faced helpfulness of the kind sportsmen have before interview fatigue sets in. Is he Jon or Jonathan? "Everyone calls me JB." He can't remember when he last saw snow. He usually winters in Perth, but this year he's been on an MCC tour to Dubai ("good fun") and won't get to Perth until the final month before pre-season. On April 16, two days before his 30th birthday, he will lead Surrey out here in their first four-day game - against Sussex, the team who deposed them. "I'll probably have a few nerves, but I'm looking forward to it. I'm a positive person."

Batty grew up near Derby, then near Oxford. He is an only child, the son of Gill and Roger, a keen club cricketer, also a keeper, who works in tobacco. His first memories of cricket are of his dad playing for his club and his grandfather painting stumps on the back wall of his house (no keeper required there, then). His voice has an East Midlands, Gary Lineker ring to it - flat, realistic, decent. He thinks of himself as a Londoner now, but still supports Nottingham Forest and Leicester Tigers.

He grew up wanting to be David Gower and playing among grown men at club level from the age of 11. To an only child, it came naturally. "I've always been happy in the company of older people." Father and son played for the same Oxfordshire club: on a tour of Barbados, they once opened the batting together at Kensington Oval.

He seems balanced and classless, and turns out to have been educated on both sides of the great divide. "I was at the local secondary school, then my grandmother died and left some money that she wanted to be used for my education, so I went to Repton for the last two years. It was brilliant. There were so many different things you could do."

He went on to read Natural Sciences at Durham, where he played for the university before they gained first-class status, followed by a postgraduate diploma at Keble, Oxford, where he got a Blue. He had a summer contract with Hampshire in 1993, in the Mark Nicholas (and Gower) era, but wasn't re-engaged. "I'd got a taste of being a professional cricketer and was disappointed to be released."

'In an all-star team, he has been the player least likely to be talked about' © Getty Images

He spent the next three summers "trialling around - the order went something like Notts, Derbyshire, Middlesex, Surrey, Somerset". He could easily have drifted out of the game, but there was no plan B. "I always wanted to be a cricketer." He kept plugging away, playing for British Universities, Oxfordshire and Minor Counties, where he roomed with Martin Saggers, now a close friend and a fellow late developer.

Batty finally received offers for 1997 from Somerset and Surrey, and opted to be third-string keeper at The Oval behind Graham Kersey and Alec Stewart. Before Batty even arrived, Kersey was fatally injured in a car crash in Australia. With Stewart mostly away on England duty, Batty became a regular. "Someone else's terrible misfortune worked in my favour."

He began to open for Surrey when Mark Butcher was with England; say what you like about Test calls, they have smiled on Batty. Between 2001 and 2003 his Championship average rocketed from 16 to 35 to 57. The Surrey Supporters' Club voted him Most Improved Player two years running, and listeners to BBC Radio London voted him their Cricketer of the Year in 2003. The invisible man was beginning to get noticed.

Even so, the captaincy came as a shock. "It's something I always wanted to do," Batty says. "I just didn't expect it to come so quickly."

Paul Sheldon explains the choice: "We wanted someone who would play all forms of cricket, someone in that age bracket, who'd been at Surrey for some time so they know the squad's strengths and weaknesses. Someone loyal, articulate, presentable and respected in the dressing-room. And if you take the England players out of the equation ... "

You can see the fences the other contenders may have fallen at: Ally Brown and Ian Salisbury are not automatic picks, Martin Bicknell is 35, Mark Ramprakash is a relative newcomer, and Butcher, who has deputised successfully for Hollioake, has a central contract.

Batty too had his obvious drawback: already having his hands full. This, rather than his personality, is what bothered the senior players. One of them told the Evening Standard, anonymously: "Even Alec Stewart couldn't do all three jobs." Batty's answer is characteristically upbeat. "I'm a positive person and just because it hasn't often been done, doesn't mean it can't be. I think one reason I was getting more runs last year was because of going up the order. I find it easier, especially if we've been in the field, to just have that 10-minute break and carry on. You stay focused and you've got the feel of the pitch."

Sheldon is more wary. "That must be a decision for captain and manager together. What I've said to them is, that decision shouldn't be cast in stone. Jonathan's made it clear he wants to open, and maybe he'll be the first one who can do it."

With Ward's place going to the gifted but raw Scott Newman, it will help if Batty can open at least until Butcher rejoins them in June. But what if the triple burden proves too much? "That's something that will have to be assessed at the time," Batty stonewalls, "as any player's form is."

He was flying to Sydney to meet Rixon in late February, and the club was still in a certain amount of flux. Sheldon said the vice-captaincy hadn't been fully decided; Batty said the vice-captain would be Ramprakash. Batty is not sure when he last captained - "probably the 2nds a couple of years ago". Asked what sort of captain he would be, he says: "Lead from the front both batting and fielding, setting good examples, but not being afraid to get input from other players."

What I meant was, would he be attacking or defensive, orthodox or quirky, but it was perhaps asking too much for him to say. Or even to know. He will only discover what sort of captain he is by doing it: even Steve Waugh played safe at first. Batty has read Mike Brearley's The Art of Captaincy, which is a good start, and he is certainly personable. Asked if he goes in for the Surrey strut himself, he says: "Not me. More of a wicketkeeper's waddle." But if you inquire about his batting he's gung-ho. He knows how many hundreds he has made (six) and stresses that five have come in the past two years. He sees himself as an England player, just as he saw himself as an opener and a captain, and David Graveney mentioned him in dispatches last September. He's clear about why he plays: "To win." Not to entertain as well? "I think the way we play is entertaining. But the reason you play is to win."

What do Surrey need to do better? "We have a great foundation in our style of play and work ethic that has been in place for much of the last decade. I don't see too many areas that need huge overhauls, we just want to keep on winning cricket matches."

It's going to be an interesting season at The Oval. Cinderella isn't just going to the ball, she's helping to run it, and there are several candidates for the Ugly Sisters. If two of Bicknell, Jimmy Ormond and Tudor stay fit, Surrey should be back in business. But Rixon and Batty will have to click, which is another unknown. The double appointment is surely a gamble. "I wouldn't say that," Sheldon says. "It's a very calculated risk."

Batty seems both a young player and a senior one. He drives a boyish car (a BMW X5 off-roader), likes boyish films (Top Gun, Lock Stock), lives on his own in Wandsworth although he's "seeing someone". In the dressing-room, he is said to be much teased, though not disrespected. Captains who have known rejection tend to be the better for it. Batty's determination has carried him a long way, and now he needs to go further. It's a big ask.