Part of the beauty of cricket is its inclusiveness. It is a haven for all types — but few were harder to fathom, in my experience, than Chris Lewis.

Here was the supreme athlete who underachieved; the intelligent man who more than once punctured a hole in his career through sheer stupidity; the warm, friendly face who was also a committed loner, for whom controversy was never far away.

At first his cricketing mistakes were given the benefit of the doubt, but after a while our patience ran out. Before a Young England tour we were scheduled to meet at a national performance centre at Lilleshall, near Newport, Shropshire. Lewis went to Newport, South Wales. Then, in the Caribbean in 1994, he shaved his head completely the day before a match, got sunstroke and was unable to play with the result that he was labelled “the Prat without a Hat” by a tabloid newspaper.

The last straw, at least for me as captain, was when he missed the start of play on the morning of a Test match at the Oval in 1996, and blamed a puncture.

Perhaps this unreliability was part of the reason that his claims that England cricketers had been paid to underperform in the mid-1990s were taken less seriously than they might have been.

In this instance, though, Lewis behaved appropriately, by merely passing on to the English and Wales Cricket Board information that had been passed on to him.

At his best, he was a beautiful cricketer to watch, all languid ease and athleticism.

The coincidence that his latest troubles come as England prepare for a Test match in Madras will not be lost on his admirers: it was there, 15 years ago, that Lewis scored his only Test match hundred.