A ball is driven past him towards the boundary at the Gabba in Brisbane. Jones is in good spirits. He has just taken his first Ashes wicket, Justin Langer, and he desperately wants another bowl. The ball doesn’t reach the boundary, so Jones, as he has been taught, drops onto his right knee to make a sliding stop. His studs catch in the soft Gabba turf . . .

For a long time, Simon Jones could not watch what happened next. He has only seen the video a couple of times since he left the Brisbane hospital and he still winces at what he knows is coming. At night sometimes, or when he’s driving, the pain comes back to him as if he were once again lying on the ground with the Australian crowd baying for him to get up. Thoughts of the injury, the moment his studs caught in the ground and the whole weight of his 6ft 3in frame contorted his knee so badly every television viewer winced with him, are a sharp reminder of how his career nearly ended before it had begun. It was the apparent innocuousness of the moment and the enormity of the injury that shocked. Only later did he discover that the Australians had been warned against sliding in the outfield because of the relaid turf.

Athletes know when injuries are bad, but all Jones can remember about being stretchered off the ground by Steve Harmison and Jason Gillespie was a flying can of Coke and an Australian accent: “Get up, you weak Pommie bastard.”

Harmison was all for putting the stretcher down and leaping Cantona-like into the crowd, Jones’s instinct was to join him. But, in one sense, he is grateful: it has given him a reason to get even.

He can hear the voice again now, sitting in a hospitality suite looking out over a sunlit Sophia Gardens and reviewing a Test series that has pitched him once again onto centre stage.

Since that day in Brisbane and his ruptured cruciate ligament, since the taunting voice, Jones has set his heart on beating the Australians. “You know, if I’d been bowling that day and suffered the injury doing what I love, I wouldn’t have minded so much,” he says. “But just to slide on the outfield and lose 16 months of your career, that just seemed wrong.

“They say things happen for a reason, don’t they? I believe that. So maybe it was meant to happen. The injury has made me hungry again, I’ve realised things aren’t to be taken lightly. My career could have been gone in an instant. I’m a far better bowler than I was then, I’ve come back better and stronger, so maybe this has been a blessing in disguise. Maybe I was being told I wasn’t ready then.”

Maybe Simon Jones’s mother thought in the aftermath of his injury that her son was descending into self-pity, maybe she wanted to take his mind off the pain and occupy his time. Whatever the reason, her gift of It’s Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong’s account of his recovery from cancer, proved inspirational. The point of the story was perspective. One busted knee versus a 20% chance of living. If Armstrong could survive and return fit enough and strong enough to win the Tour de France, then young Jones could start bowling fast again.

But Jones, Swansea-born, Llanelli-bred, didn’t really need to look beyond his own doorstep for perspective or encouragement. The Who’s Who of Test Cricketers describes the career of Ivor Jeffrey Jones like this: “A well-built strapping Welshman . . . a fast and graceful left-arm bowler, who had immense fire, speed and sustained hostility. Just when he was rising to his greatest heights in May 1968 he tore the ligaments in his elbow and never bowled effectively again.” Jeff Jones’s son Simon has now played more Tests than his father’s 15 and taken more wickets than his 44.

“It was in the back of my mind when the injury happened to me,” he says. “I wondered if it was a sick twist of fate.

I was a little bit younger than he was but his career slipped when he was about to become a serious player.

“My dad would be lying if he said he didn’t think about what might have been. It must be terrible to have something like that taken away from you at such a tender age.