Matthew Hoggard has spoken for an hour-and-a-half; as loose as he might be if you met him in a pub and touched the right chord. Memories, opinions, lots of self-deprecation, funny stories, and they come in a torrent, crashing through the normal boundaries. Diplomacy? What is that? He laughs, you laugh and a grey morning in Yorkshire is brightened by one of sport’s endangered class: a character.

When he has answered every question and is about to leave, he remembers something. A question he wasn’t asked but wishes to answer. “We didn’t talk about Sarah,” he says, referring to his wife. She has always been there; friend, soulmate, lover, and he knows it wasn’t easy for her over the summer. During the Ashes she saw a different Matthew Hoggard, one that was harder to love.

Let him explain this. “I have always been this stress-free person, a chilled-out character. But I got stressed during the Ashes because it was the biggest expectation we’ve ever had to deal with. It was stressful because we were winning. It would have been fine if we were getting dicked every day, like in the past. But we were on front pages, back pages, every news bulletin, and for the first time it felt as if we were carrying the hopes of the nation. That weighed on me and Sarah had to put up with a lot. She saw me in moods she had never seen from me before.

“She came to every game, came to the hotel, listened to everything I said, told me about things in her life and I wasn’t listening, not really interested. She would ask, ‘What do you want to do tonight?’ and I would say, ‘Can we stay in the room?’ “Because you can be yourself with your wife, Sarah had to put up with the s***. She probably bitched about me to everybody else, but around me she was so supportive. She was perfect. I could confide in her, run things past her, tell her how much the pressure was affecting me, and she would look me in the eye and tell me to stop being so stupid. When I was at my lowest and grumpiest, she put me back on an even keel. ‘Do you realise you are one of 11 people in a place that everyone in this country would love to be?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘There’s only space on that team for 11 people and you are good enough to be one of that 11’.

“I started to think, ‘S***, yeah’. It put me right. We had that conversation before the fourth Test at Trent Bridge. The ball swings at Trent Bridge, my kind of wicket, and I got three quick wickets.

“Somewhere in what you write, you’ve got to mention Sarah.”

THE OTHER loves of his life are Billy and Molly. Billy, the doberman, who is bossed by Molly, the border collie. What attracts him to the dogs is unbending loyalty. Whatever his mood and regardless of how he responds to them, they give themselves unconditionally. So with them, he can play the man he is.

When he sits, Billy will sidle across the room and lay his head on Hoggard’s lap, wanting to be loved. He watches as Billy follows Sarah around the house, as if he, Billy, was put on earth solely to protect this woman. One of Hoggard’s simplest pleasures is taking the dogs for a walk on Baildon Moor, alongside their home in West Yorkshire. “You have company all the way but no obligation to talk,” he says.

He should have been a vet, and for so much of his young life, he thought he would be. Nobody would have been surprised. John, his dad, taught maths at a school in Priesthorpe; Margaret, his mum, was a lab technician at Crawford school in Pudsey, the West Yorkshire town where the Hoggards lived. They could see he loved animals, the outdoor life and he was clever enough. But, right at the end, the plan was revised.

Was he fated to be a cricketer? Did he have so much talent that it decided everything? Bollocks, he would say and then begin to tell you about Phil Carrick, the great Yorkshire cricketer who inspired a young Matthew Hoggard to become a half-decent bowler.

He recalls the day the call came from home to say that Carrick, who was just 47 and suffering from leukaemia, had died. He and Sarah were in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where he was furthering his cricket education playing for the Free State.

“I don’t remember who rang, I think it was Dad, and even though I answered, he said he wanted to speak with Sarah. That was really strange. He didn’t want to tell me, I went and had a shower and when I got out, Sarah told me.”

Hoggard had been in Pudsey Congs’ 3rd XI when Carrick came as skipper to the club. He was 15 at the time, a teenager with A-levels on his mind; Carrick was a county great then in the autumn of his career. They knew him as Fergie, nicknamed after the traditional Irish song, Carrickfergus: “I wish I had you in Carrickfergus . . .”