Andrew Strauss's retirement means that the England dressing room is never going to be the same again. For one thing, it’s going to be a lot quieter.
Strauss possesses one of the biggest voices you have ever heard, the force of it capable of leaving a medium-sized market town in ruins.
It was hilarious watching him being interviewed one-to-one by Tim Abrahams, the similarly loud Sky Sports roving reporter, because the conversation would get louder and louder until, without the aid of a microphone or satellite, they could be heard in China.
That, his Radley education and his unfailingly positive, up-and-at-’em nature, gave him the demeanour of a public school head boy and meant he was the butt of tons of stick and plenty of jokes in the dressing room.
Matthew Hoggard first christened him Lord Brocket before settling for Posh Twit (I think it was Twit). Swanny, of course, kept up the tradition, and one of the big reasons why we are all so sad that Strauss is no longer leading us is that he could not only take it brilliantly but knew how to give it back, too.
Sometimes, when a team-mate takes over as captain he can tend to distance himself from the team. Not so with Strauss.
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When we retained the Ashes in Melbourne, we even got him to do the ‘sprinkler’. For a co-ordinated man, his effort at that was pure comedy gold.
Strauss is a great communicator. He had it in him to make a ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech — and did so when he thought it was appropriate.
But there were also times when we were in the huddle at the start of a day’s play, the cameras were buzzing around and he felt we might be in danger of getting too caught up in the tension of the moment. So he would tell us something genuinely funny or leave us scratching our heads by plucking a baffling Chinese proverb out of thin air.
In fact, Strauss just had a way of reading situations and people and doing and saying the right things at the right time that demanded 100 per cent loyalty.
No matter whether he was in good nick, putting on a brave face when going through a bad patch or dealing with other issues, you always got the feeling that he really cared about his players, whether he felt they needed a kick up the backside or a calming word.
I’ll never forget how he was with me during the World Cup in India last year. Truth be told, after the long Ashes winter, I was running on empty. I’d bowled poorly in the first two matches against Netherlands (0-72) and India (1-91) and was expecting to be dropped for the next game, against Ireland.
But he took me to one side in practice and said he wanted me to play and that he was backing me. For a player out of form, he said everything you want to hear from your captain and it gave me a great deal of confidence. Although we lost, I bowled my best spell of the tournament and went on to take 2-16 in the next match against South Africa.
Hands on: Strauss will be much-missed by EnglandWhen he then realised he might be flogging a dying horse, he had the strength to make the right decision and leave me out for the quarter-final against Sri Lanka.
As for rollickings, once he had delivered his talk to us when taking over the captaincy in West Indies in 2009 — about players taking responsibility for our own performances — he rarely needed to give them.
When he and Andy Flower came together, they really nailed what we needed to do to become No 1 in the world.
But when it was necessary — during the meeting after we were beaten by Australia at Headingley in the penultimate Test of the 2009 series — he did not hold back. People have said this is a sad time for Strauss to go. Ideally, we’d have beaten South Africa or at least drawn with them and he could have gone out on a better note. But the fight we showed at Lord’s was a tribute to him. All he asked of us was to just keep fighting. That’s what we did and we came very close to causing an upset.
People have speculated that the Kevin Pietersen issue might have been a factor in Strauss’s decision to quit. I don’t think it has been ideal but he was thinking about this before that stuff started, so I don’t think that has been an issue at all. That sort of thing just wouldn’t influence a man like Strauss.
Not a factor: The Kevin Pietersen saga did not influence Strauss's decision to quitIt was a measure of the man that his reasons for giving up the job were all about what he felt was best for the side. He has still shown glimpses of form but he knows what it takes to succeed at this level. He wanted to give a new captain time to settle in before the Ashes next year.
And what a way to go — leaving all of us a personal, hand-written letter. Each one was different and the full contents of mine will stay between him and me, but the gist of it was that he was proud of us and that he had many great memories to take with him. Class.
Now it’s over to Alastair Cook. It was one of Strauss’s strengths that he had the total respect of the players, and Cooky is the same.
While I’ll bet a number of the guys would love to have a go at being captain, there is not a single quibble or qualm about the fact that Cook is the right man to take over.
As Strauss’s understudy, he has shown he has a good cricket brain. He loves a challenge and, as captain, he is going to face plenty of them.
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