For those who like their sporting heroes down-to-earth, there is nobody quite like Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff. Easygoing. Man of the people. Salt of the earth. Choose your own sobriquet.

Something close to a genius with bat and ball, at least when he’s not hobbling around with the many injuries that have dogged his career, Flintoff is a superstar of admirable insouciance. “How do,” he says with a grin as he lumbers into an East London hotel and, when he spots the marketing types in the room, declares, “You’re not all here for me, are you?” Well, yes Freddie, we are. He laughs, shrugs and heaves his 6ft 4in frame into an easy chair.

Four months ago (was it really that long?), Flintoff played a defining role in England’s epic victory over Australia in the Ashes. In the second Test at Lord’s, as the Aussies threatened an improbable comeback on the final day, Flintoff delivered a spell of sustained aggression that turned the match, and the series.

Michael Atherton, cricket correspondent of The Times and a former England captain, wrote: “Flintoff was the plot, the subplot, the chapter headings and the footnotes of the 21 overs it took England to bury 75 years of Ashes hurt at Lord’s. Bowling unchanged for ten overs from the Pavilion End, as quickly and with as much hostility as any England bowler has mustered in recent times, he took three of the last five wickets to fall, giving him his first five-wicket haul at Lord’s.”

In all England’s great performances of the past ten years – most famously, winning the Ashes back from Australia in 2005 – Freddie Flintoff has been at the heart of things. His feats are carried off with the air of the local hero who strides on to the village green and swats the opposition away with disdain. There is a quintessentially British amateur spirit to him. He personifies the comic-book qualities of natural talent, self-belief and sportsmanship that are so loved by the crowd. Stadiums erupt as he marches to the wicket before he has a chance to hit a ball.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing – and the most heroic – about that summer-defining spell in July was not its passionate belligerence, but the pain Flintoff endured to deliver it. His injured right knee had already ballooned to the size of a beach ball in the build-up to the match, and he had to undergo three cortisone injections just to get out on to the field of play. In the morning before the action, the pain was so intense that Rachael, his wife, had to help him get his shoes and socks on.

“I was prepared to do anything it took to get on the field,” Flintoff says. “A lot has been said about cortisone and its potentially damaging aftereffects but I don’t think I’m going to escape unscathed anyway – I’ve already been told I’ll get arthritis in my knee when I’m older, and a few cortisone injections are not going to affect that one way or the other.”

As Flintoff took his fifth wicket, he slowly dropped to one knee, his arms splayed in triumph, the crowd rising to its feet to acknowledge one of the finest sporting performances of recent times. The feat had special poignancy because it was Flintoff’s last Test at the home of cricket – he had already announced that he was to retire from the five-day game to concentrate on one-day cricket and Twenty20. Some four weeks later, after more heroics from the England team at the Oval, England reclaimed the tiny urn regarded as the most precious prize in Test cricket.

Now, as England embark on their one-day campaign in South Africa and Test series next month, it will be a different sort of team without him. He is the kind of player and personality who will leave a hole in the dressing room; and he will surely feel he is losing something without that camaraderie. When the toss goes up for Test matches from here on, he says, “That’ll be the moment I realise part of my life has gone.”

On winning the Ashes this year, he says: “The feeling was amazing, and it was great to have played a small role in making it possible.” Then he adds, “But the euphoria was also very fleeting. As we were celebrating in the dressing room after the match, reliving what had happened, the team doctor came in and asked for a quiet word. He said it was possible to bring my knee operation forward by 24 hours, to Monday [the next day].

“That put a dampener on things, because my mind was already throwing forward to the op. I spent a bit of time with the kids, and went to Starbucks with my wife, but by the time the press conference was finished on Monday morning, I was nil by mouth. It was a bit surreal: the whole nation was celebrating while I was getting ready to go to hospital. It was a big operation. The surgeon put me under a general anaesthetic so he could fracture the bone to stimulate tissue growth. Now, fingers crossed, I am on the road to recovery.”

Pain, triumph, surgery, rehabilitation; pain, triumph, surgery, rehabilitation. Welcome to the world of Andrew Flintoff.