Today comes the chance for a last hurrah in the Twenty20 Cup, but between Hollioake and a happy ending stands the monumental figure of Andrew Flintoff. It could be the best duel of the summer, although Hollioake, the man who can destroy entire batting line-ups with a bag of Liquorice Allsorts, normally comes on for the fourteenth over of the innings, by which time Flintoff, if he is opening and still in, will have about 100. No county match all season has been more appetising. Nor have most of the Tests.

Hollioake thrives on brevity. He is the best player in the short history of the English game’s shortest form: the winning captain last year, the star all-rounder this time. With the bat, only Flintoff, Ian Harvey and Andrew Symonds can match his fierce hitting, and all of them go in higher up, where you have the luxury of a full over to play yourself in. Hollioake appears at No 5, when half the sand is already in the bottom of the glass.

With the ball — or the scuffed, splodgy, battered blob that passes for one after an hour of mayhem — he is the death bowler supreme. He is Oddjob, with the role of the bowler hat going to his slower ball, which is so paceless that, as was once said of somebody else, if he doesn’t like it, he can run and fetch it before it gets to the other end.

Twenty20 has been the perfect stage for Hollioake. It’s fast, intense, subtler than it first appears and has been a shot in the arm for English cricket as a whole, just as Hollioake’s captaincy was for Surrey. His entire career has been like a good Twenty20 match: full of compressed excitement, rumbustious populism and cheerful improbability.

Most county captains travel a long and winding road, joining the circuit at 18 or 19, leaving at 36-plus. Hollioake, still not 33, made his Surrey debut just 11 years ago. He was unknown in 1994, promising in 1995 and captain for much of the time in 1996, when Alec Stewart was away on England duty. In 1997, as captain proper, he lifted the Benson and Hedges Cup, won by an innings of outrageous nonchalance from his brother, Ben. The enduring image of Ben is of a languid flick into the Tavern for four. The enduring image of Adam is of a grinning figure holding a trophy aloft in a spray of champagne.

In 1999, after a generation of underachievement, Surrey finally won the championship. Six more trophies followed in four seasons. They had the heaviest Test call-ups in the country, yet kept winning. Lord MacLaurin of Knebworth talked of raising the standard; Surrey actually did it, playing with a buccaneering ruthlessness that some counties found hard to stomach.

In 2003, when they let Sussex steal the championship, Hollioake became surely the first county captain to step down by mutual consent after winning two trophies in one summer.

The worst of times arrived out of nowhere in 2002, when Ben was killed in a car crash after a family dinner in Perth. Adam stayed on in Australia, consoling his parents, waiting for the birth of his daughter and wondering if he could face playing again. Returning to give the address at Ben’s memorial service in Southwark Cathedral, he made perhaps the most emotional speech attempted by a cricketer. Then he went out like Achilles after the death of Patroclus and took some of his feelings out on the opposition. In half a season he blasted 738 runs at an average of 67 and a strike-rate of nearly 100. He lifted the championship again, and was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year.

His international career was equally eventful: four wickets on his one-day debut against Pakistan in August 1996; man of the series in the 3-0 demolition of Australia in 1997, when Ben joined him in the team; captain in Sharjah the same year, leading England to a briefly famous victory that he later conceded was tainted by rumours of match-fixing.

He might have made a decent Test player, a big-hearted, front-footed, bottom-handed fighter, halfway from Tony Greig to Robert Key. But the real crime was not giving him a fair go as one-day captain. Even now, his name would add zest, wit and fire to the drab squad that England announced yesterday.

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