At Sussex we can’t understand what the surprise is all about. I was asked by a journalist yesterday why Peter Moores should be the next England head coach. “Why not” was all I could think of. Why wouldn’t you choose a man who, in a few years at Sussex, transformed a Shire horse of a club into a thoroughbred? Why wouldn’t you go for a man who has had nothing but ringing endorsements from everyone he has coached since becoming the Academy director? And a product, not only of county cricket, but the ECB’s coaching system to boot? It’s an obvious move.

When I joined Sussex in 1995, Peter was still playing. There are many ex-Sussex players more qualified to talk about his feisty wicketkeeping or his gutsy lower-middle order batting. His stats tell a story of a journeyman county pro but if that is true, it was not a wasted journey. Somewhere along the way he developed an enthusiasm and passion for the game, and a brain that buzzed with innovation and energy. He also developed an empathy for a struggling player, so important in a coach but so seldom found in the top players.

On becoming coach, that vigour was let loose on us. Nothing was to be the same again at the club. Warm-up drills — so often a revealing piece of theatre — became original and energetic and involved more cones than a motorway road works. The point? To make sure we were switched on to the first ball of the day. Often, when fed up with them, we’d joke that he must have invented the drills in the garden with his son and daughter. But we knew other teams were watching us and taking notes.

He introduced a new vocabulary into the dressing-room. Words like intensity, honesty and belief. Classic sporting clichés, I know, but they began to mean something under Peter’s guidance. A fan of taking ideas from other walks of life, he began to challenge us to be mountain people, not valley dwellers. Were we givers or takers?

His laid-back appearance belies a fierce intensity that blazes within. Once or twice a season it exploded. After a series of poor matches in 2002 we sat in the dressing-room at Tunbridge Wells and were given the Moores stare. His top lip quivers when he is angry and he bares his teeth in what looks, to the uninitiated, like a smile. The “smile” that day in Kent was a precursor to a humdinger of a dressing-down. He told each of us in turn whether we were giving to the team’s energy or taking from it.

Needless to say the takers won hands down. When it came to me he stopped for a moment, then said: “You’re just neutral . . . which is even worse in my book.”

Cricketers can be precious and take criticism poorly, but with Peter it was always fair and, mostly, constructive and it was this, combined with his genuineness as a human being, that inspired the Sussex players to want to improve and win trophies.

I once interviewed him for the club magazine. What he told me that day is very revealing about the man: “I want Sussex to be the team of the decade. I want the players to respect the traditions of the club, to know what the martlets are, to know what standards are expected of them to be a Sussex player, to know why they play the game; for each other and the love of the game.”

My advice to England players? Don’t be ambivalent towards those three lions on your shirt. Intensity, passion, drive. Call it what you will. It is, above all, these qualities that Peter brings to the party. A half-hour chat with him about cricket (admittedly a fairly one-way conversation) will leave you feeling that it is the greatest game in the world again — and how invaluable might that effect be on, for instance, a tour-weary Steve Harmison?

English cricket has had a touch of the Shire horse about it this winter. The smart money will be on Moores to re-instil more than a dash of the thoroughbred into proceedings.