Stuart Broad’s bowling may have helped England to win the final Ashes Test this summer, but it was Broad’s impersonation of an owl and the other eccentric superstitious habits of his team-mates that helped England to draw the opening match of the series in Cardiff.

When Paul Collingwood walked back to the England dressing-room at the end of an innings that had lasted almost six hours on the last day of that match, he was greeted by silence. Not one player muttered “bad luck” or “well done” or even ticked him off for getting out with a dozen overs to go. “It was the greatest innings of his life but none of us paid him any attention,” Stuart Broad recalled in his interview with The Times. “We were all doing our rituals in the hope of saving the game.”

For the previous two hours, Broad and his team-mates had been nervously repeating the same actions over and over, fearful that a change would lead to a wicket. “Alastair Cook was in the showers and wasn’t allowed to come out,” Broad said. “Matt Prior was drumming a ball up and down, 100 times or more, and I was rocking on my chair. As every ball was bowled, I rocked back and then as it was survived I rocked forwards and blew into my hands like an owl. It was bizarre but I couldn’t change it.”

Cricketers are as superstitious as any sportsmen. “I always scrape my mark three times, batting and bowling, and I bowl three practice balls or do three practice shots,” Broad said. “It was a routine that has been with me since my first first-class game. I also always say ‘cheers’ to the umpire as I take my cap off and ‘thank you’ as I give it to him.”

The Cardiff rituals helped England to draw the first Ashes Test, but Broad says that the captain could easily have put a curse on the team’s rearguard batting. “[Andrew] Strauss is a bad one for jinxing our batsmen,” he said. “He will say, ‘Those two are looking great’, and suddenly a wicket will fall, or someone will play a hook shot and Strauss will say ‘shot’ in that booming voice of his and then we’ll see a fielder under it at square leg.”