Stewart's unyielding patriotism fuels desire to fly England's flag

Veteran of 117 Test matches driven by love of his country and hope of appearing in one last Ashes series

It is 7.55am at The AMP Oval, formerly The Fosters Oval, originally The Oval. Around the corner in a greasy spoon, I have just had a mug of tea and toast, alongside Mark Ramprakash. The talk was of England v Sweden and Roy Keane v Mick McCarthy. Even cricketers are preoccupied with the football World Cup.

Alec Stewart, a devoted Chelsea fan, is gutted that Graeme Le Saux is not in Japan. "Eriksson picked Danny Mills, so it can't be for discipline. Graeme's been booked twice in 36 games for England. There must be something else, but I don't know what it is, and nor does Graeme, so he tells me."

Still, even without his mate, Stewart reckons England will prosper. "I think the semi-finals are a realistic chance," he adds. "It depends how long it takes for someone to tread on Beckham's foot. But if they get through the first stage, it means they are playing well. And if they are playing well, they can beat anyone."

Stewart's optimism is coloured by red-and-white tinted glasses. He is bulldog-fierce in his patriotism, quite unable to comprehend why the national anthem is not played on the first morning of a Test match.

"They do it before football and rugby internationals, so why not in cricket? Because it's a five-day game? I can't understand it. You line up both sides, play both anthems, then the game starts. It shows respect for your own country and whoever you're playing against. But in 116 Test matches it's happened maybe four times, always in other countries."

Stewart has flown the flag admirably so far against Sri Lanka, on Thursday accounting for the tourists' top three batsmen, with Kumar Sangakkara becoming his 200th Test dismissal as wicketkeeper. But he is in his 40th year now. Surely it hurts more than it did, both keeping wicket for England and toughening up the middle order?

"It doesn't, actually. Age doesn't come into it, it's how fit you are. I know people in their early 30s who ache more. In my book, it's better to be a young 39-year-old than an old 32-year-old. Look at David Byas, Kim Barnett, still playing, still doing well.

"I would like to give myself a chance of playing this winter, in the Ashes and the World Cup. If I were sole selector, I'd be going, but I appreciate that I'm only playing now because young James Foster is injured.

"The selectors have to work out their policy. Are they picking for the future, which he represents, or for now, which gives me a chance? If I can perform well I will at least give the selectors a headache. It would be nice to have one more crack at Australia."

He fixes me with unblinking blue eyes. It occurs that if Stewart could act (and there are those who think he can, still disbelieving his flat denials that he accepted money from the Indian bookmaker Mukesh Gupta, of whose unproven allegations more later), he would be perfectly cast as a company sergeant-major in a film about Dunkirk or Rorke's Drift. He has fought enough rearguard actions in his time, and I can certainly imagine him ordering squaddies to clean their boots.

Stewart's own meticulousness has long been regarded by his fellow players with a combination of awe and amusement, and he feels much the same about the disorderliness of others, cheerfully admitting that Michael Atherton's shambolic cricket bag was like something out of his worst nightmare.

"I keep my stuff folded, my shoes are always lined up, my batting gloves are numbered, whereas Ath had more of the student outlook. He'd chuck it in, then pick it up, have a sniff, and if it didn't smell too bad he'd put it on. The trouble was that he had no sense of smell. At Lord's we'd always change next to each other. I'd have an immaculate area, but by the third day of a Test match his stuff was always creeping into my area. I used to kick it back, very politely. Now [Andrew] Flintoff has taken over that spot, and he's even worse."

As so often in sport, two contrasting personalities off the field formed a complementary partnership on. Atherton and Stewart opened together 29 times in Test matches, recording six century stands.

"I think I averaged about 47 as an opener, which stands up pretty well in world cricket," says Stewart. "We had to break up a proven opening partnership for me to drop down and keep wicket, so to strengthen the side in some ways, we weakened it in others."

Not that he minds being wicket-keeper, indeed he relishes being in the thick of the action, advising the bowlers, when asked, where he thinks they might be going wrong. "Tewds [his Surrey team-mate Alex Tudor] uses me as a checkpoint; is he jumping out in the delivery stride, which he has a tendency to do? Is his wrist staying behind the ball? Is he following through straight or pulling away too early?

"But Tewds is good enough to be anything, as a batsman as well as a bowler. He's only just finished growing, but he's a keen learner, and as a bowler he's got pace, he gets the ball to bounce, he moves it about, he has a reasonably consistent action. Once he's established in the team, I expect him to stay in it for a long time."

In which case, with Andrew Caddick and Darren Gough in the England attack, he will be in the very best company. "Caddick and Gough," says Stewart, "would be in any world XI. A bit like Atherton and Stewart, they're chalk and cheese, but they're both world-class."

The combination c Stewart b Caddick is not quite threatening to expunge c Marsh b Lillee from the record books, but has nevertheless accounted for plenty of fine batsmen, among them Sanath Jayasuriya at Edgbaston. And at county level he is kept on his toes, too, principally by Saqlain Mushtaq. I ask whether, given his supposed susceptibility to spin, keeping wicket to Saqlain, and Ian Salisbury, has helped his batting?

"Not really. I don't think so. But I have worked hard on batting against spin. I admit it's not been one of my strengths, especially in recent years because when I was opening I'd have 30 or 40 on the board by the time the spinners came on, whereas in the middle order you often start against spin.

"I think I've improved a lot over the last 18 months. I did OK against [Muttiah] Murali[tharan] in Sri Lanka and I've learnt to hit the ball slightly softer. Duncan [Fletcher, the England coach] has got me making a little press, a small movement with the front foot, which stops me going at the ball too hard."

As a man marginally more patriotic than John Bull, whose joy at scoring a century in his 100th Test match was greatly inflated by the happy coincidence that it occurred on the Queen Mum's birthday – "it's fairytale stuff, isn't it, what you dream of," he declared at the time – where did Stewart stand, I wonder, on the appointment of the Zimbabwean, Fletcher?

A smile. "Duncan's appointment, like Sven Goran Eriksson's, was obviously very good for England. At the time I thought it reflected poorly that we couldn't find an Englishman to coach the national side, but I admit that was a blinkered view.

"Duncan's an impressive character, and he wasn't caught up in the politics of English cricket, so like Sven [Goran Eriksson] he came in with his own ideas.

"He's very calm, and has been successful in business, which shows in his man-management skills. Plus, he's always looking to learn from other sports. He follows golf closely, and uses the example of Tiger Woods to stress that we should prepare for every match as though it's the most important one we will ever play. It sounds obvious, but sometimes players need reminding."

Stewart, I suspect, needs less motivation than most, the more so now that his Test career is ticking towards midnight. He knew, indeed, that he might be calling time on it himself, by making himself unavailable for last winter's tour to India.

"There were three reasons I didn't go," he says. "By the end of last season both my elbows needed operating on. I couldn't pick up a cup of tea, let alone a bat, without it troubling me. Also, I'd been touring for 13 years, and my kids are now eight and five. I wanted to spend some time with them. The smallest reason was the allegations from that Gupta fella. I was tipped off by a journalist that if I went, his paper was going to bring up the story again, and for the sake of my family I didn't want all that to resurface."

Gupta's widely-chronicled allegation was that on the 1992/93 tour of India, Stewart accepted £5,000 in return for information about pitch and weather conditions, team composition and morale. Those of us who have met him find this nigh on impossible to believe, for he exudes integrity. That said, so did Hansie Cronje, the South African captain who admitted accepting money in exchange for match information.

"That [the Cronje revelations] amazed me," says Stewart. "But they won't even let him coach. In my view, if he can give something back through coaching youngsters, they should let him."

The Gupta business aside, one wonders whether, had the tour been to Australia or South Africa, Stewart might not have given it the elbow. After all, he has never pretended to enjoy his tours of the sub-continent. "Yeah, but I've been to India three times before," he says. "You put up with those places. I'll be honest, I prefer to go to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, but it wasn't that. It was fitness, family, and those allegations, in that order, really."

We are interrupted by his mobile phone, which trills not "Rule Britannia" but the theme tune of The Great Escape. When he has dealt with the call, I ask how he would change English cricket, given the power?

"I would reduce the number of sides," he says without hesitation. "I'd be radical in trying to make England the best side in world cricket, which unfortunately would mean getting rid of the present county set-up and a lot of fellow professional cricketers. In my view, you should have the best playing with and against each other as often as possible, but at the moment the gap between domestic and Test cricket is too wide.

"That gap would diminish if you kept some counties but at a higher level had regional sides. Obviously it would have to be done in stages. You can't fold nine counties or get rid of 200 cricketers suddenly.

"But ultimately you'd have the South-East, South-West, Midlands, North or whatever. The tourists would play six games, against the county champions, England A, and then the regional sides. That would achieve two things. It would give the selectors a chance to see only the best English cricketers, and it would mean the tourists not getting easy games where they can rack up plenty of runs, get plenty of wickets, and then enter a Test match against England on a high."

Blimey, he seems to have considered the matter pretty thoroughly. Has he lavished such thought on his own future?

"I do know that I want to stay within sport," he says. "In recent times I've started to think that coaching, which had never appealed, might be a possibility. But when I do pack up international cricket, I would like to play another full year here, if they still want me. For 13 years I've been an England player who plays for Surrey, but I started as a Surrey player in 1981, and I'd like to finish as a Surrey player."

Thus would his career be neatly bookended, which would, of course, surprise nobody.

Life and Times: Alec Stewart

Born: 1963 Merton, Surrey

Height: 5ft 11in

Weight: 13st 12lbs

County team: Surrey

Nicknames: Stewie, Squeaky (as in 'clean')

Role: Right-hand bat, wicketkeeper

Favourite sportsmen: Graham Gooch, John Hollins (former Chelsea footballer), Shane Warne and Pete Sampras.

Career: County debut for Surrey, 1981. Test debut v West Indies, March 1990. One day international debut v Sri Lanka, October 1989.

Honours: Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1993. Awarded the MBE on 13th June 1998.

He says: "Me and Jack Russell used to take our own food on tour to India and Pakistan. During the 1996 World Cup I had breast of chicken, mashed potatoes and broccoli for 43 days on the trot."

They say: "Alec Stewart who, like the legendary CB Fry of whom it was originally said, is himself a ministry of all the talents..." (Henry Blofeld in Cakes and Bails)

Test matches: 117. Innings: 209. Runs: 7,509. Average: 39.10. Highest score: 190. 100s: 14. 50s: 38. Caught: 222. Stumped: 11.

One-day international appearances: 146. Innings: 141. Runs: 4,100. Average: 31.53. Highest score: 116. 100s: 4. 50s: 23. Caught: 136. Stumped: 11.