'I could have cried myself to sleep'

Wicketkeepers are supposed to be bonkers or brash or both. Geraint Jones is neither, leaving Emma John to probe his quiet sensitivity for a core of steel

Geraint Jones has certainly had his ups and downs as an England player © Getty Images

Geraint Jones is the kind of man your granny would approve of. He turns up early for our appointment. He has clean, boyish features which, with the help of the England blazer, suggest a well-mannered head boy rather someone on the verge of 30; he was England's second oldest player in the first Test at Nagpur. Halfway through our interview, when a piano interrupts, he picks up the recorder and holds it carefully to his mouth for the next half an hour.

There must be something slightly unhinged under this veneer of smiling normality. The tradition of England wicketkeeping demands at least one form of obsessive behaviour, be it ultra-patriotism or setting a timer on your Weetabix. "Generally I feel I'm stable," he says, laughing. "There are so many characters in the side and I'm a fairly quiet-natured person. If I tried to be loud and boisterous I'd probably spend more time concentrating on that than my wicketkeeping."

Perhaps a summer studying Jack Russell's psyche has immunised him. Jones had the former England keeper on hand during the Ashes and was determined to ransack his brain for tips. "He's a very natural keeper, so he's very good in terms of thought processes," Jones says. "Keeping's all about being relaxed but alert, so the thing is not to create tension. He's great to speak to about ways of reducing that tension, being at your best in terms of concentration but very relaxed in your hands and shoulders."

Russell still sends the odd piece of advice via text message - "Don't 4get 2 pack the beans" perhaps? - but Jones has always maintained a certain independence in his training. "I've got where I am from working a lot of stuff out myself, so I pretty much know my game and know what I need to adjust." His style is as much of a hybrid as his accent. Like any aspiring Aussie gloveman, he was indoctrinated with the Ian Healy style of keeping - long catches taken on the inside hip. But his method has since had to adapt to English conditions. "I grew up doing it the Healy way but I just don't feel that suits my game. I try to be as natural in my movements as I can."

Remarkably it took him only four years of professional cricket to become England's No. 1 keeper - and two of them were in Kent's 2nd XI. "Looking back I'm glad it happened all so quickly," he says. "I was a little bit older than the other guys, so I didn't have the time frame that others had." He points to the seven years it took Marcus Trescothick and Andrew Strauss to make it from county debut to England cap. Has the process felt rushed? "It's felt right the whole way along, I've been ready for each progression."

But he admits it has left him exposed. "I've had such a quick rise that in a way I've learned on the job. And, yeah, I've made some mistakes but I've learned from all of them." Last year's Ashes series had plenty to teach him - not about technique but how to deal with hard knocks. From the moment he put down both Jason Gillespie and Glenn McGrath on the third day of the series at Lord's - the last two wickets added 95 runs and took the first Test out of England's reach - the ink began to flow. Overcoming the critics was, says Jones, his toughest trial to date.

England's wicketkeeper has recently held some stunning catches in India © Getty Images

Flak was coming from all sides. At Trent Bridge he received hate mail from fans who wanted their own Chris Read on the pitch. "I don't mind the fans, because that happens. They were showing their passion. And that's fair enough, they thought that their guy should be in the side. There were just as many for me as against me."

The poison pens were put in the shade by the Sky commentary team. "It hurts when you hear ex-England players calling for you to be dropped from the side when the Test match is only two days old" - mentioning no names, Bob Willis - "especially when people have been in the position you're in, knowing that's the last thing they'd have wanted to hear. I did get the feeling that I became an easy topic to revert back to, if there's not much else to talk about."

He looked to Ashley Giles as a model of how to respond. "He's been through the same but for a longer period, so I did watch and learn from him. The best way is to go out and perform fantastically." Jones stops short of pouring his heart out to a diary - he says he does not have the discipline - but he looks back on certain moments as vindications, personal replies to the cynics. "That's how I try to deal with enemies," he says. "I still don't like it but I've got used to it."

Old Trafford was, perhaps, the most important retort of his career. On the third day of the Test, as England lost nearly the entire day to rain and Shane Warne batted to save an Australian follow-on, Jones missed Warne twice (one catch, one stumping). He returned "as low as low could be" to the hotel. "That was when I thought things could not have got any worse. It was a big turning point for me because I could have easily sat in my room and cried myself to sleep."

Instead Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison scooped him up and took him to the dog-track. History does not record whether any of them backed a winner, but Jones left feeling like one. "The next day I came out and hit Glenn McGrath for six, four, six," he remembers. "I got 28 off 12 balls, so I showed them what my batting's about. And the way I kept on that last day at Old Trafford, with the ball turning, and took that catch off Straussy's knee - that's not really been written about too much but I know how well I kept that day."

Flintoff has been a special ally. When they bat together it looks as if Fred has brought his little brother out to play and there is an almost familial affection between the two. "We've got an understanding, we don't need to say a lot but we can recognise when we do need to say something to each other," says Jones. "We do get on well off the field and that really helps. That's why I enjoy batting with him so much."

Around the hotel lobby team members are whiling away the hours until 9.30pm, when their flight to India takes off. At the next table Kevin Pietersen chats to one of the England support staff. He and Jones could not be more different in demeanour, yet they have a personal experience that gives them more in common with each other than anyone else in the team. Both have repatriated, courtesy of a British parent, and now live thousands of miles away from their respective families, in order to represent a country neither knew until his late teens.

It has been a long time since anyone questioned Jones's heritage. As with Pietersen it filled some column inches when he arrived; and the fact that he took an Englishman's place in the Kent side caused some indigestion among the parishioners. But even the Australians laid off him during the Ashes. "I was expecting to get some verbal treatment but that wasn't there," he says. "Matt Hayden mentioned the old club I played for in Brisbane when I was batting once. But it was not like in previous years. When Martin McCague went over to Australia he got some fearful stick."

Jones's unusual route to England has become a piece of much quoted trivia. His parents, Emrys and Carol, left Wales in their mid- 20s to teach in Papua New Guinea and Jones was born four years later in Kundiawa, a small Catholic missionary town set among the mountains. "The pictures and the memories I've got are of a beautiful place," says Jones. But by his sixth birthday the island was becoming dangerous and his parents moved on to Queensland. With the current political instability, Jones does not know if he will ever go back.

Toowoomba, where the Jones family settled, is a country town about the size of Swindon but with more crop farms. Geraint loved his sport but playing cricket for a living was only "a distant dream". "You hear of guys who knew from the age of eight that was what they wanted to do. But that wasn't me." At 12 he lost his mother to cancer. He has said that event forced him to grow up more quickly but he still had no particular ambitions. "Nothing grabbed me at all. I'm quite lucky things have turned out the way they have because otherwise I'd just have drifted along and worked to survive."

He took his first trip to Britain at 17, after leaving school. Three years later, back in Australia with "an average job", he told his father he wanted to move here. "He thought I was a bit mad," says Jones. Why his son would want to do the reverse of his trip, to leave a beautiful climate and enviable lifestyle for the more hidden charms of Clevedon, in Somerset, and Abergavenny, Emrys could not fathom.

"I had ideas of university" - Jones gives a short laugh - "and getting some qualifications." Cricket was nothing other than "an avenue in" to a British way of life. And a successful one it proved. At his first club, Clevedon, he picked up a girlfriend, a university student called Jenny who would come down to watch her father play on the weekends. At his next club, in Abergavenny, he found a job.

The club president Brian Shackleton owned pharmacies in South Wales; Jones was installed and began his pharmacy technician's course. But he never finished it. Shackleton allowed his employee time off to pursue his trial with Kent in the county's 2nd XI and success spun him a new course. "If it wasn't for that freedom I don't know what would have happened really," says Jones. "All the way along, if I've ever had any thought or plans, the sport's taken over."

Jones rarely takes the glory for his achievements. Outside circumstances always seem to have shaped them. This September he will marry Jenny, who has been with him for nearly eight years - even joining Kent's catering team when he moved there in 2000. "We've tested each other out well and truly," he says with a laugh. "She says that she's the reason I stayed in the country, so she takes a lot of the credit for where I am. Which is fair enough because it's probably true."

There was another wedding a few weeks ago. It was Jimmy Anderson's and Jones bumped into Chris Read there. You imagine the pair making small talk about the flowers, then gulping their champagne in awkward silence. But no: it is, says Jones, a "very amicable" situation. "There was never any animosity between us."

In confidence terms Jones knows he has turned a corner. He says he still does not take his place in the team for granted - his career has been too up and down for that - but he finally feels comfortable with his role. "It's taken a couple of years but I think it does in international cricket," says Jones. "I feel I'm at an exciting stage because I know what it's all about now and what I need to do to perform really well. So I feel that my performance will really be lifted from now on."

He is particularly looking forward to the fact that in India, for the first time in an away series, he will have a qualified wicketkeeping coach to hand in Mark Garaway, England's new team analyst. "Before there hasn't been that role so if you're finding it hard it is tough to know who to speak to," says Jones. "I spend a bit of time working with Matt Prior when we're away and we buddy up in the gym. But it's more needing someone to talk to if you're not feeling quite right technically - someone who can have an eye for it and say, `You're not doing this as well as you were two weeks ago'."

After the tour he will return to the old Kent farmhouse (and "bit of land") he shares with Jenny and prepare for their wedding. There are the considerable logistics of family and guests from Australia to manage and it all seems rather oddly grown-up. "At heart I still feel 17 or 18," he says. "It doesn't seem that long ago I was leaving school." And with that, the baby-faced wicketkeeper of England smiles courteously and hands back the recorder.