Come Wednesday morning at 10.30, weather permitting, all eyes will be on Andrew Strauss and Ricky Ponting to see who gains the first advantage in the series. How important a toss it is, only time will tell, but if the expectations are true and the Cardiff pitch is going to turn then, it will be handy to be batting first.

If that is the case, the choice of words as the captains explain their understanding of it all will be interesting. Interviews held in the middle just after the toss are largely mechanical but now and then you get a revealing moment, maybe a look of disgust as the coin comes down the wrong way. For both captains the real work on the field starts half an hour later, although that is just an extension of everything that has been done beforehand.

With Michael Vaughan announcing his retirement from all cricket last week, there have been plenty of tributes from his former charges and it has been no surprise that the likes of Marcus Trescothick and Steve Harmison have highlighted Vaughan’s ability to raise their levels of self-belief. Sadly, this is not a talent given to all who lead cricket teams, whether it be at Test level, a county side or the village team.

We can normally find somebody in our teams with whom we can empathise but the trick is to find the key to what makes every player tick, and that is not easy. I, and many others for that matter, always come back to Australian paceman Rodney Hogg’s bon mot on Mike Brearley - that he had a “degree in people”.

It is an excellent summation of what you need to make a team work. Brearley was my first England captain and I had immense respect for him.

It did not mean that he had to be in my ear all the time or that I had to listen to endless expressions of psychological wisdom. The best captains know the art of judging when a word or a chat is needed and for some players very little extra encouragement is necessary. Brearley, of course, knew precisely how to gently wind up and unleash Ian Botham in 1981 and we all know what happened then.

My first county captain, more noted for his Ashes win in Australia in 1970-71, was Ray Illingworth, who looked and sounded very different but was in essence the same. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of his opponents and a straightforward way of dealing with his own men that they respected.

If Strauss can achieve the same with the likes of Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, he will be in clover. It might sound strange to mention two men for whom motivation and performance are not normally an issue, but the way the captain manages his stars is crucial, not just to Pietersen and Flintoff themselves, but also to the others in the dressing room. If they are on-message it is so much easier to keep everyone else on track.

The signs are that Strauss and his team director, Andy Flower, got a lot of that right against West Indies in the Caribbean and in the first part of the summer but in the face of the tougher opposition that the Australians will provide, team unity is going to be all the more important, especially if there are any early setbacks. If there are, the immediate response will be: “Remember 2005 and Edgbaston.”

Talking of which, if ever there was a game in which Vaughan’s ability to remain calm under pressure was important, that was it. I don’t suppose even he would say that, with the Australians having got to within a whisker of victory, he was 100% confident of his team winning but at least he did not let any anxiety he may have been feeling come to the surface.

At times like that the decision, for instance, to have a man square on the cover boundary so that when Brett Lee scorches one through cover it is only for one run and not the four that wins the match, becomes vital. Yet every captain knows that there have been a million other little and not so little decisions taken to get to that point. The whole point about captaincy is that it is relentless. There is never a moment off.

Strauss is good and also has that cool exterior. What he has yet to prove is that he possesses more of those Vaughan-, Brearley- or Illingworth-like traits. To win this Ashes series he will have to be braver than he was in the Caribbean, where caution in Antigua and, with trickier equations involved, in Trinidad cost him the series. He did at least show us in that series that he can raise his own game in response to the demands of captaincy and if he can do that again over the next couple of months, a lot more will fall into place. It has long been a pet theory of mine - not exactly a mind-blowing one, I admit - that if your own game is in order all the decision-making becomes a lot easier.