The model patient

Groundhog Day is how Simon Jones describes his winter. He means the monotony of the weekly travelling to and from Loughborough for rehab. But, as he takes his lunch-break at the Academy's HQ, with his England team-mates losing a Test series thousands of miles away, there is an unspoken sense of déjà vu.

It is the day before the Academy breaks up for Christmas and his right ankle - now minus the bone spurs that kept him out of the final Ashes Test - is healing well. His training is, to judge from the frequent yawns, intensifying. His only complaint is that he misses the sun: "It does brighten me up a bit."

Jones has been here before, literally and metaphorically. Watching his team on TV, reading newspaper columnists tell him what a difference he could be making. "It's almost like," he blows his breath out noisily, "'Can I have a break from this?' It's not very nice." For one moment his body language looks defeated. Then he sniffs and pulls himself upright. "But you have to take it on the chin, you know?"

During his last rehab - the 18-month stint courtesy of a Brisbane outfield and a busted knee - he determined it would make him a better player. He gave up alcohol for a year and devoted himself first to his fitness, then to his bowling. When injury struck again last summer, before the final Ashes Test, he knew how to cope with it, both mentally and physically.

"I'm pretty realistic, I'm as fit as I ever can be, but you can't exactly prepare your bones to play," he says with a rueful look at his ankle. "My knee was a freak injury. There's nothing I could have done about that. This one has just come from wear and tear. Everyone gets injuries, every bowler in the world. I've just been unfortunate that mine have been quite lengthy ones."

His voice rarely reaches more than a low, sometimes scarcely distinguishable, rumble but behind everything he says there is a flinty determination. "You realise you get sent these tests every now and again, they're there to see how you deal with them and if you can't push yourself that extra bit harder to get back from them." Now he is doing the same again. Even as England are being floored on the subcontinent, not just by Pakistan but by a woolly sense of their post-Ashes ambition (which was, according to Jones, "just to carry on the form really"), Jones has started work on his own personal, and very specific, target. He introduces it, in his matter-of fact way, as if he is signing up to an evening course. "I want to try and become world No. 1 in the next year. I want to have a go at it."

This is no idle New Year's resolution. It is the natural direction of a bowling career that has been gathering pace, not to mention consistency and stamina, since his return to the team in 2004. The ECB inked him in for the West Indies tour even before he was fit - a vote of confidence that gave his recovery a huge boost and for which he "can't thank the England Cricket Board enough". He turned up in the West Indies with a remodelled action and a new run-up and feeling, for the first time, that he truly belonged to the England team. Since his return to the side he has taken 54 wickets in 16 Tests.

He is a man full of surprises. Australia discovered that, to their cost, last summer. A misplaced - even arrogant - assumption that Jones took wickets only with the old ball prevailed among the Australian batsmen (plus a few English pundits). "People labelled me a one-trick pony at the start of the series," says Jones. "But when I bowled those spells at Trent Bridge I was bowling with a normal ball and swinging it conventionally." He took five wickets in the first innings and was opening the bowling in the second when he was forced to limp off the field.

The Australians are not the only ones he has convinced. Jones has watched his role change over the last six months thanks to the increasing confidence of his captain. Only last winter, in South Africa, there seemed a reluctance to throw Jones the ball until it was dirt-brown. "There's nothing I could do: I couldn't go up and say 'Look, Vaughany, I want to bowl,' because maybe I wasn't in his plan of attack. So I took it on the chin and worked my socks off this summer." After Bangladesh Jones claimed 18 Aussie scalps in four Tests. "I think I've gone up a little bit in his estimations," he says modestly.

Jones expects more of himself too. "When you get to 27 or 28, that's when your body's really strong and that's what I am looking forward to now." Even his batting is getting a makeover. "I've changed my stance and I'm trying to get more consistent in leaving balls and picking the right balls to hit." He has a rivalry with Steve Harmison ("He hooks a lot better than me; I duck") and would love to step off the bottom batting rung but at the forefront is a devotion to Duncan Fletcher's mantra: Every Run Is Vital. "There were incidents where I've run down the middle of the track and got my big bum in the way to stop them hitting the stumps, and it's something you do, you know?"

With his unassuming manner, it is strange to think this is the England player who most often loses his temper - not to mention a proportion of his pay - in wrangles with the opposition. It was not always the case. "When I first came to the Academy I was a lot shyer than I am now. Rod Marsh really brought me out of my shell. Now I'm thinking you're here to do a job and, if you're intimidating someone, then you're doing a good job and don't worry about it."

In that case he did a good job with Matthew Hayden during the 2005 NatWest series. "I get on well with him," he says unexpectedly. "Whenever the Aussies invite us into their changing rooms he's the first guy I go and talk to." So does he ever regret his actions? "No, I've never regretted them to be honest because I've never done anything that bad." Nevertheless, he does plan to learn more self-control. "Yeah definitely. I'd be skint otherwise."

It sums up his contradictory character that he is equally close to the quietly studious Ian Bell (Jones thought, when he and Harmison first bowled against the 18-year-old at the Academy, "this boy's got something") and the rampant showman Kevin Pietersen. Pietersen has already usurped the playboy role so often assigned to Jones, but Jones's modelling career has boomed since the Ashes. Not only is he the new face of Jaeger but he thinks nothing of slotting a six-hour magazine shoot into his rest day. It is a sideline he enjoys, albeit one that earns him much ribbing from his camera-shy team-mates. Still, do not imagine that Jones is giving Pietersen tip-offs on the best venues to schmooze celebs. Jones now avoids the high life. "I'm trying to keep myself clean. I've been back in Wales where there's hardly any exposure because it's all rugby ... it's if you go to London it kicks off. I've kept my head down." As for relationships, the kiss-and-tells have had a dampening effect. "I am very wary now. It's a sad state of affairs when you're worrying about people's motives."

Most of his winter weekends have been passed with his family in Llanelli. It is endearing to hear him talk about his Christmas/birthday celebrations (he was born on December 25) with mum, dad, his brothers Richard and Matthew, and the cousins in nearby Carmarthen. "We are very, very close," he admits. "I've been brought up properly, you know? We were brought up to respect each other." He shares a flat with Matthew, his rugby-playing twin - "not identical, similar kind of bone structure but he's shorter," he says (the model will out) - and loves hanging out with Richard's two-year-olds Ben and Theo. Twins run in the family.

Jones counts himself lucky to have had a Test-playing father watching over him as he grew up. Jeff Jones's own career ended prematurely after 15 Tests and arthritis in his elbow, and his experience was one talked about openly in the house. "My mum said it was a very tough time. He had to go back to a nine-to-five job and for any sportsman that's a terrible feeling." After Brisbane Jones thought it might be his fate too. He wrote himself out a list of alternative careers. "I looked at it and I thought 'No, bugger this. I'm coming back from this.'"

There are two other pillars of support in Jones's life. Erjan Mustafa joined Glamorgan as physiotherapist six years ago; when the 21-year-old bowler began to suffer injuries, 'Erj' was an early ally. "He stood up for me quite a bit. He said, 'Look, you have to realise that he's not the body type where you can just thrash him. You've got to look after him and bowl him 15 overs a day rather than 20. So he tried to nurture me through." It did not always work. "Some of the skippers wouldn't listen."

It was Erj whose humour and friendship made Jones's post-Brisbane rehab not only bearable but enjoyable. Stuck with each other six days a week, the two could have driven each other mad but instead they became closer than ever. "I have a hell of a lot to thank him for because he got me through it in the end," says Jones. "There weren't many people who wanted to rehab me at the time because it was a risky case where reputations can be lost."

Then there is Troy Cooley, England's bowling coach, who announced at the end of last year that he will take up a new post in Australia next year. "He's like a big brother to me," says Jones. Only this morning the pair enjoyed playing a practical joke on a group of elite coaches, who were being given a coaching seminar by Cooley on 'How to Handle an Elite Athlete'. Jones, who was supposed to be assisting Cooley, turned up late, rowed with Cooley and stormed out, leaving the students aghast.

The identity of Cooley's successor Jones can only guess, since there are few specialist bowling coaches in England; he personally has enjoyed working with Kevin Shine but says the new appointment "could be quite a surprise". "It's a job I'm sure the next person will enjoy. We're a good bunch of boys and we take to people," he says, sweetly. Cooley's decision to return home is, says Jones, a "sickening blow", although one he fully understands. "England are going to lose a very, very good bowling coach and I'm going to lose a very good friend," he says. Equally dispiriting was the news that Erjan Mustafa is leaving Glamorgan - by mutual consent, although Jones says darkly he is "disappointed" by the outcome.

Jones's current relationship with his county is "OK". It has rarely been anything more sentimental. He has, curiously, never been picked for the Wales side that plays England in NatWest friendlies; when his ECB contract demanded last year that he appear as England's 12th man, the crowd overlooked that fact and abused him anyway. "'Judas' came out, bottles of water were thrown at me," he says. "Doesn't bother me. I just take it on the chin, you know."

It is a chin that has held up well against everything thrown at it, from the dry year of 2003 to the monumental blow-out at the end of the Oval Test ("I drank solidly for a month, I reckon") and now he must prepare for the moving on of two of his best friends. But first it is back to his beloved gym, where he will continue to prepare his body for India and hope that bad luck has finally run out.