Smash hit

Swann’s carefree approach — which let him brush off the loss of the Stanford millions better than most — is perhaps a reaction to the way his family played the game. He could never become as wound up by the game as his father, Ray, a Geordie who moved to Towcester to teach and a keen amateur cricketer, and his elder brother, Alec, who spent several seasons with Northants and Lancashire. “My dad was an exceptional league cricketer. Wayne Larkins said he was the best player he ever played with who didn’t play first-class cricket. But I wouldn’t say he played with a smile on his face. He took the game very seriously and my brother takes after him. I’m just a happy mixture of my mum and dad.

“My brother would smash the changing room to smithereens, like my dad did, but the couple of times I did it I felt a bit embarrassed. There are times when you feel like having a rant but it tends to be when you’ve been cheated out. I’ve got no time for people who come in and rant just for the benefit of the coach. There’s a few who do and it’s pathetic.”

Swann was 20 when chosen for an England tour of South Africa in 1999-2000. He had done the double of 500 runs and 50 wickets but was not ready for the big time and was peremptorily sent back to Northants, where he languished for several seasons. He was desperate to get back into the England set-up but the harder he tried the worse things became.

Fortunately, he realised his cricket would not improve until he started enjoying life again. Unfortunately, in 2003 Northants signed a new coach, Kepler Wessels, whose spartan work ethic was directly at odds with the Swann philosophy. After enduring two miserable seasons the young allrounder was on his way to Notts.

“The fun factor had been completely stripped out of the game. I wasn’t wanted by the coach and I didn’t want to play for him. My heart wasn’t in it and I thought about giving up. I was breaking up with a girl I’d been going out with for ages, I wasn’t playing good cricket and the dressing room was banned from laughing at my jokes.

“I should have left a couple of years before I did but I’m glad I didn’t because I wouldn’t have appreciated just what a good place Notts was. When he signed me, Mick Newell [the Nottinghamshire coach] said he wanted me to be my chirpy bubbly self and inspire others to be the same. That was music to my ears. I am more than happy now to have been ‘clinically depressed’ for 18 months. It made the next three years an absolute pleasure. I appreciate things more, having had to work that much harder to get where I am.”

Swann is determined to live life to the full or, as he puts it, tick off everything he wants to do before he dies. Hence his occasional involvement in a Nottingham rock band, Dr Comfort and the Lurid Revelations, whose other members rehearse far more than he does. “I turn up once in a blue moon. I’ve got to be sensible. I can’t be seen doing it at the wrong time, so it tends to be the weekend I get back from tour. I drink a few pints of Guinness and wake up the next morning with no voice and a headache. We have a whale of a time.”

Swann’s success with England — he has taken 34 wickets in seven Tests — has coincided with a more stable period in his life. He is engaged to marry Sarah in January, 10 days after the end of England’s tour of South Africa. “I don’t want to tempt fate and say I’ll be on the tour, but it would be a bit foolish booking the wedding in mid-December and having to fly home for it.”

There has been one scare. In March, a long-standing elbow problem resurfaced with a vengeance. Swann struggled through Tests in Antigua and Trinidad, sometimes bowling with tears running down his face. He went to America for surgery to remove many pieces of floating bone.

The process couldn’t have been smoother and he was soon back bowling without having to grimace through the first ball of a new spell. But he endured an anxious period. “I lay in my hospital bed thinking, ‘What if I can’t bowl any more?’ I decided I’d make my millions on the after-dinner circuit taking the mickey out of Freddie [Flintoff].”

Having endured his share of ups and downs, Swann looks on in amazement at some England teammates on whom the real world seems to have left barely a scratch. I remind him he once said Monty Panesar, the spinner he displaced, seemed to be mystified by real life.

“What I said about Monty is true of several people in this squad. I simply don’t know how they have got to their age without electrocuting themselves or doing themselves some real harm. Ravi’s like that, Luke Wright, too. Some of the things they say and do . . . they are just on a different planet. Rob Key asked Adil Rashid the other day what animal a lamb came from . . . he thought it was a cow! He actually said it out loud. The comedy value is priceless. That’s what I meant about Monty. I love him to pieces but I sometimes wonder how he’s got to this stage without wandering in front of a train or a bus.”