Before the start of the Ashes series, I did a strange thing. I drove to Lord’s on a non-cricket day, parked behind the museum, went in, and looked upon the Ashes for the first time. I knew what they looked like, of course, (which English or Australian cricketer doesn’t?) but I had never set eyes upon the urn itself, nor thought too much about what it represents.

The only day of Test cricket I saw before I became a Test cricketer was an Ashes match. The Ashes match, if you like — “Botham’s Ashes” of 1981. Actually, the day I was at Headingley was rather dull, John Dyson grinding out a worthy if utterly unmemorable hundred. But, days later, I can remember standing outside a Rediffusion shop in Manchester, watching a television through a window with a crowd of people as Bob Willis completed that remarkable victory.

It was the Ashes that got me hooked on cricket and I went on to play in seven Ashes series, without any great success. Truth be told, I never thought that much about what I was playing for: the contest in itself was enough. At that time Australia were the best team in the world; they had a number of undeniably great cricketers, against whom it was a privilege to play. That was what I was playing for: to test myself and the team I represented against the best. The Ashes never really came into it — and I never got hold of them.

Standing in the Lord’s museum in front of the urn, in its Perspex box with a solitary light illuminating the fading words, gave me a chance to think about all the fuss. Funny, a Perspex box was the focus of much attention at Lord’s last year, too. Allen Stanford, described at the time as a Texan billionaire, now as an alleged fraudster, brought a Perspex box with him stuffed with $20 million. He thought that he could buy cricket. What he bought was the acquiescence of administrators with a feel for money, but not the game, and cricketers happy to play a meaningless match for a fast buck.

What he could not buy was meaning and context. That can only come with the passage of time.

I suppose the urn has two meanings: one physical, the other symbolic. The physical urn is important only in terms of its value as an historical artefact and because of its place at the start of what has become a remarkable narrative. When, during the 1882-83 series, Ivo Bligh accepted a small terracotta urn from his future wife at a country game just outside Melbourne, how could he have known how much agony, grief and joy it would produce?

More important than the physical urn, though, is the symbolic. The Ashes are as much about Australia as England, a chance for them to show that their system is stronger, which results over the past 50 years would suggest it is. It also gives a chance for the kind of needle we all know exists between the two countries to be expressed.

In recent times Australia have been better at calling upon historical antecedents as a way of inspiring and motivating. So it was that, before the 2009 Ashes, every touring Australian was asked to speak to the group about what the Ashes meant to him.

Michael Clarke gave a PowerPoint presentation, replete with images of past Australian glories; Ricky Ponting spoke about the day his uncle, Greg Campbell, was called up to the Australia team for the 1989 Ashes tour and Ponting got to see and feel the Australian cap and kit for the first time, and so on. This was a team attempting to understand what I was trying to understand when I went to to see the Ashes.

For 16 years, between 1989 and 2005, the Ashes had lost its significance as an arbiter of where the balance of power lay in the cricket world. Not that, with the rise of India, the 2005 series necessarily solved that question, but with the Ashes now a contest rather than a procession, interest began to register again. Never mind that the never-to-be-mentioned 2006-07 series suggested a return to one-sided ways, the twists and turns of the “greatest series ever played”, as the 2005 series soon became known, had whetted the appetite again.

And there was enough evidence to suggest that the 2009 version would be another close-run thing. The biggest factor in this supposition was not England’s improvement after the whitewash of 2006-07, but the break-up of one of the greatest winning machines in cricket. A look at the Australia squad on the eve of departure confirmed what Andrew Strauss would refer to as a “loss of aura”.

Gone were Matthew Hayden, Justin Langer, Adam Gilchrist, Damien Martyn, Jason Gillespie and, most tellingly, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath. Nobody had done more than the last two named to ensure Australian dominance of the previous 16 years. Langer continued to ply his trade in the LV County Championship and he was Australia’s spy in the camp. Before the series Tim Nielsen, the Australia coach, asked him for a dossier on England’s players and he supplied what came to be an explosive document when it became public. In it he suggested that England are great front-runners but that they quickly go “flat and lazy” when things get tough.

“English players rarely believe in themselves,” he wrote. “Many of them stare a lot and chat a lot, but this is very shallow. They will retreat very quickly. Aggressive batting, running and body language will soon have them staring at their bootlaces rather than in the eyes of their opponents.”

All good stuff — not that these contests need any outside influences to stir the blood.

Historians may look back in time at the 2009 Ashes and puzzle over its outcome. After all, Australia scored eight hundreds to England’s two and dominated the list of leading wicket-takers. By many statistical indicators, they should have won. But, in a way, such an illogical result was a good thing because the game had begun to be dominated by the statisticians to an unhealthy extent, players and spectators alike becoming sucked into their importance, to the detriment of the bigger picture.

What matters more than bald numbers are the big moments and the match-winning performances and, on that measure, England had Australia’s number. The five-for count was four to two in England’s favour. At Lord’s England produced two match-winning performances, Andrew Strauss’s first-innings hundred and Andrew Flintoff’s astonishing spell on the final morning. At the Brit Oval Stuart Broad accepted Flintoff’s mantle with a match-winning spell on the second afternoon. Three times Australia suffered collapses, in the first innings at Lord’s, Edgbaston and the Oval, and they were costly.

Statistics have long been aimed at Flintoff. I make no apology for denying him greatness, but accept that he has been a remarkable cricketer for England and his place in English cricketing history was assured by events at the Oval. What a delicious way to go out.

Flintoff was the focus of the summer, but not the man of the summer. That accolade belonged to Strauss, who was immense throughout and is an impressive individual full stop. Few people would have been able to juggle the demands of captaining England in the Ashes, being father to a growing family, moving house, running a benefit and having a book ghosted.

Strauss’s strengths were as a leader, not necessarily as a strategist. He is essentially a cautious captain, prone to thinking primarily about saving runs, not taking wickets, and about getting into a position from which defeat is impossible before thinking of victory. Those quibbles aside, it is clear that he is enormously respected by his team, as leader, player and human being — even if they think him a trifle posh. His greatest attribute was his calmness, his ability not to get sidetracked by every crisis that came his way. His was a reassuring presence at the top of the order and at the head of the unit.

The association he developed with Andy Flower, the team director, was critical. The Flower-Strauss arrangement stands now with the Duncan Fletcher-Michael Vaughan alliance that was at the heart of the 2005 win. Since Strauss and Flower are decent, grounded, modest men it is unlikely they will let the team get carried away with victory as the 2005 side did.

If the 2009 series did not quite live up to 2005 it was because the quality of the cricket was not as good. There were fewer great players on show, fewer great individual performances. The victories for both teams were on a massive scale, unlike four years before, only Cardiff providing a nail-biting finale. Nevertheless, the 2009 Ashes gave us much to be thankful for.

Atherton’s Ashes: How England Won the 2009 Ashes by Mike Atherton is published by Simon & Schuster on September 1 at £18.99. To buy it at the special offer price of £17.09, phone 0845 271 2134