Andrew Strauss is an ordinary bloke. Not boring exactly, but ordinary. Straight hair, straight bat, straight-laced, straight shirt, straight everything in fact. The only foible — almost an eccentricity — that I could discern during an interview in central London yesterday was that the England cricket captain has a tendency to talk really, really loudly.

Disconcertingly so. I was only a foot or so away from the man, yet he would suddenly bark out answers as if I was standing at the end of a long railway platform. Did he think I was hard of hearing? Is he hard of hearing? Was he worried that my new Dictaphone (digital, sleek and so much better than my old cassette version, which always seized up in the middle of interviews) would fail to pick up his utterances?

Either way, for all the loudness, there was not a great deal of red meat in the content. There was me hoping for some hidden depths, some mysterious qualities, some spice, even some juicy gossip from the inner sanctum of the dressing room, yet Straussy, as he is known (as well as, predictably enough, Levi and Johann) kept hitting back with answers even straighter than his bat.

Not that there is anything wrong with this (except for the fact that my editor will sack me if I keep coming back from interviews without a scoop). I mean, why on earth should we expect top sportsmen to have much to say? Why do we think that being able to hit a jolly good cover drive or score a goal from 30 yards means that you are going to have a personality like Russell Brand or an unusual take on the philosophy of Wittgenstein?

I even put this point to Strauss, in what I thought would make for a pleasingly postmodern line of questioning. “Sportsmen are there to play sport,” he replied in true syllogistic mode. “It is not necessary to be too complex or philosophical in terms of your personality because often that can make you question things too much when things go wrong. If you try to dissect everything, it can inhibit you when you are trying to play.”

This struck me as an interesting point, even if, by now, I had a headache from all his shouting. Are you saying that being dull as dishwater is a prerequisite to being successful in sport? “Not dull exactly,” he bellowed. “But it helps to be uncomplicated. To keep things in perspective. To keep the mind free from lots of analysis and speculation.”

All this talk of psychology put me in mind of one of the more interesting things in his new book, Testing Times, (a book, incidentally, that not only charts his return from a drastic loss of form in 2007 but goes on to examine his greatest triumph as captain of the England team in the Ashes series of the summer — quite a publishing feat when you consider that there is normally a lead time of a year between a book being written and hitting the bookshelves.) In the opening chapter, Straussy (as I now call him) reveals a key turning point for his career was coming across a book in 2008 called The Secret, a tome from the “self-help” genre that articulates, as its centrepiece, something called the “law of attraction”.

This is not, sadly, something to do with the “Lynx Effect”, but a new twist on the power of positive thinking. “If you can get it [the law of attraction] working for you, you can achieve anything,” Strauss writes. “If you think positive thoughts, then those positive thoughts will come about . . . Why do we score runs when we are in good form? Simple. We believe that we are going to, and so it happens. Why do we not score runs when we are out of form? Simple. In our minds are thousands of negative thoughts. We are worried about technical problems, about our place in the side, about being humiliated and, sure enough, it comes to pass.”

This is pretty emphatic stuff, but does Strauss really believe it? Does he think that the law of attraction helped him to overcome his dip in form in 2007? “Without doubt,” he said. “If you have negative thoughts, you are hesitant and uncertain at the crease and you don’t back your game plan. That is when you fail. But if you can go out to bat with your mind full of positive thoughts and positive energy, you will make runs. Lots of them. It is inevitable.”

But what if the bowler has also been filling his mind with positive thoughts about getting you out for a duck? What if he has also been trying to get the law of attraction working for him? What then?

Strauss hesitated. “I suppose the law of attraction says that if the bowler believes in himself more than you believe in yourself, then he will come out on top,” he said. “But I have always believed — and I suppose you have got to believe this as a batsman — that if I do everything right, then no bowler will get me out. Ever. In other words, the law of attraction is more on my side than his.”

It is an interesting, if rather contradictory, assertion, but I decide to leave it. I am running out of time and I am super-keen to get out my final question, not to mention my hands on some aspirin. I have noticed that Straussy wears his wedding ring around his neck when playing. This strikes me as fascinating, perhaps telling us something deep and intriguing about his relationship with Ruth McDonald, an Australian actress whom he married in 2003 and with whom he has two children, Samuel and Luca.

So I pounced. You are a bit of a closet romantic, aren’t you, I asked. Strauss looked a little uncomfortable. “Romantic? Why do you say that?” he said. Well, the wedding ring round your neck. “Oh that,” he said, relieved. “I only do that because it is uncomfortable under my batting glove. I would leave it in the dressing room but I would probably lose it. So I tie it round my neck with an old shoelace.”

So there you have it. Not an outgoing chap. Not a complex chap. Not even a romantic chap. But a straight and, it has to be said, extremely likeable chap with crisp, matter-of-fact answers, a simple attitude to life and an ability to think positively — the law of attraction and all that — even when the odds are against him.

I thanked him for the interview, shook his hand and headed for the door. But even after I had left the room, walked down the corridor, out into the street and down towards Hyde Park Corner tube station, I could still hear that voice, barking out answers to his next interviewer.