He takes body and soul to the crease. You would entrust him to bat for your life

The Steve Waugh Interview: The Ashes are more than a Test series. The archetypal Australian tells Andrew Longmore the voyage is one of discovery

It is a frightening prospect for the England players that Steve Waugh firmly believes he is getting better. There are one-day shots he has yet to master, he says, and his lengthy list of batting achievements does not include a triple century, an omission which reflects his position in the batting order more than any weakness in his technique or concentration. Waugh is not the batsman you would choose to be watching on the last afternoon of your life, but he is the one you would entrust to bat for your life.

This summer, when the real Ashes action stirs, Waugh will be there, his features almost indistinguishable now from the battered old baggy green cap which he cherishes so dearly. Waugh, you may remember, was the player who incited the rest of the Australians to discard their common sunhats and don baggy greens when they took the field against West Indies one afternoon, and it was Waugh who took his cap into the dressing room of the Australian rugby union team as part of a motivational talk before a Tri-Nations match against South Africa.

To a generation of England cricket followers, Waugh has come to define Australian-ness. His walk to the wicket, authoritative, assured, never too dilatory or unnaturally hurried, prompts the same sort of sinking feeling that opponents of Ivan Lendl, Mats Wilander and Bjorn Borg must have experienced. A confrontation with Waugh, as many bowlers instinctively understand, is an examination of willpower as much as skill. How deep are you prepared to dig? It is no coincidence that the greatest of Waugh's innings have stem-med from adversity, nor that his favoured position in the batting order, No 5, is the one where he can exert most control over the psychology of a match.

Strangely, because he is built for Test cricket, his innings in the Super Six stage of the last World Cup which hauled Australia to victory over South Africa has become the most vivid symbol of his fighting qualities. Reduced to 48 for 3 chasing 271, Australia needed to win to stay in the tournament. Waugh's century effectively settled the destiny of the trophy and propelled Australia into a remarkable sequence of success ­ a record-breaking 16 straight Test victories ­ which ended only last winter in India. The innings also defined Waugh's captaincy, gave him the confidence to do things his own way in a dressing room largely inherited from Mark Taylor.

"I've never gone out there chasing someone else's tail or doing the job the way someone else has," he says now. "You've got to work out your own method, you've got to lead by example and earn your respect and hopefully your players will respond to that." Waugh has set a prodigious example. Anyone who averages more than 50 over a period of 135 Tests and 15 years can negotiate his own terms with greatness, yet his batsmanship has no defining characteristic, no patent or trademark.

When he retires, he will leave little trace other than in the record books, which will suit the man just fine. What Waugh brings to the wicket more clearly than any other player is a sense of identity, the certain knowledge of who he is, what he wants to do and how he is going to do it. It was said that when Ken Barrington strode to the wicket, the Union Jack fluttered behind him. Waugh, the boy from a blue-collar suburb of western Sydney, the elder twin (by four minutes), always deemed less talented than brother Mark, the quiet, shy one who once enlisted the help of toastmasters to overcome his fear of public speaking, the husband, father of two, the reluctant republican, takes himself to the crease, body and soul.

It was not always the way. Drafted into a side ravaged by defections to a rebel touring team to South Africa and the retirements of Dennis Lillee, Rod Marsh and Greg Chappell, Waugh suffered at the hands of the West Indian pace bowlers and arrived in England in 1989 still dogged by the criticism that he did not have the nerve to play Test cricket. That soon changed, but only after he had been replaced in the Australian side by his brother, a savage blow to his pride.

"The thing I respect most about Steve as a batsman is his ruthlessness," Justin Langer, the Australian batsman, explained. "After he was dropped he made some tough decisions and turned himself into a run machine." Out went the slapdash, cavalier strokeplay, in came relentless defence and a puritanical analysis of his limitations. Waugh S has never looked back.

Waugh's single-mindedness is his greatest strength, but there were those, including Ian Chappell, the great Australian captain, who felt that it would prove his greatest weakness as a leader. Yet talking to him now you cannot fail to be struck by the restlessness of his mind. A conversation with Waugh strays quickly beyond the restricting boundaries of his profession, though cricket remains his most effective means of expression. Last winter, Waugh completed a century in Calcutta which he acknowledged, Australian journalists remarked at the time, with uncharacteristic flamboyance, raising both his arms in the air and greeting each corner of the ground with an extravagant wave of his bat.

Waugh loves India, loves the people and the emotional extremes the country inspires. India encouraged his gift for photography and a wider understanding of his responsibility as an athlete. But the century was primarily dedicated to the Udayan Home for children with leprosy near Calcutta. Waugh first saw the children several years before, when he found a note pushed under his hotel bedroom door inviting him to visit, and he has championed their cause ever since, as patron, fundraiser and hero. That his team, who are abiding symbols of Aussie machismo, have followed their captain willingly into such sensitive waters is a measure of the confidence they have in his authority. Leading the Ashes squad on a tour of the battlefields and monuments of Gallipoli, where so many young Australians lost their lives in the First World War, was more than just a regulation piece of sightseeing, it was an emotional investment.

"We don't want to be seen as just cricketers or see each other just as cricketers," Waugh says. "We want to know a bit more about each other and have different interests outside the game. In Gallipoli we got a clear perspective on what happened, and that made us more proud of our history and more aware of the sacrifices that people made for us.

"As captain, I went to a function on the first night and I just couldn't believe the warmth between the two countries, the Australians and the Turks. We fought each other, yet had tremendous respect for each other. Hearing the stories of battle, that was the hardest thing to deal with. They had ceasefires while they cleared away the dead bodies and the Australians threw the Turks paper to roll their tobacco and the Turks threw back some tobacco because we didn't have that. Even the fact that when we pulled out there was nobody killed ­ Australians put that down to great planning but the Turks put it down to the fact they wouldn't shoot anyone in the back.

"I learnt so much in two days, I can't really describe it. It was a great experience just for that. But to share our emotions amongst ourselves, that was something a cricket team hasn't done before in my time. We talked about it as individuals and the guys had to talk in front of their peers about what the experience meant. That's what we want the modern-day Australian cricketer to be, we want them to be open, to want to know each other and to learn more about the world."

Waugh admits that comparing war and cricket is trite, but that will not stop him applying some of the principles of the battlefield to his Ashes campaign. "The camaraderie, the characters, the way they followed a plan and had to work together. We can use some of things as motivation. We've already done it. When someone starts to whinge, you can say, 'Look, mate, you've got nothing to whinge about, look what happened over there'. I do think it will pull us together in times of adversity, purely because we shared our emotions and we were there together." This is the spirit of the old mining community, the brotherhood of the pit.

Waugh would have been at home in South Wales. Instead his roots stem back to a quarter-acre plot in Bankstown, Sydney, and, for 20 years, to a room shared with his brother. "There was a lot of jealousy between us," Waugh now recalls. "Who got the most runs, who got the best marks." The limit of fraternal charity was reached when Waugh presented his brother with a framed photo of the pair when Steve was captain and Mark, for one Test in Antigua, was vice-captain. Waugh's father worked in a bank and his mother was a teacher, both had potentially lucrative tennis careers halted by the demands of the new family. When Steve was selected for the Australian Under-19s, he abandoned his plans to train as a teacher ­ much to the consternation of his parents ­ and, instead, flew to the north of England to begin his cricketing career as a pro in the Bolton League.

But the brothers were clearly brought up the right way. Lynette, now Steve's wife, recalls a quiet boy with beautiful manners. Glenn McGrath's first memory of Waugh was a little different. "I played against him in a club match and I remember him getting stuck into our blokes with some well-chosen words. My first thoughts were, 'Gee, this Steve Waugh's a bit dodgy'. Later, I discovered that was just him. Club, state or country, he's out there to win."

Alan Rutherford, who later captained the Northern Ireland XI at the Commonwealth Games in Malaysia, remembers one phrase from the few weeks Waugh spent in Ireland as their overseas player. "He used to say, 'Fail to prepare, prepare to fail'. He was very big on the mental-preparation side. We'd had Hansie Cronje and Jonty Rhodes with us before. As a wicketkeeper, I loved Jonty, he was so enthusiastic and his fielding routines were out of this world. But Waugh stood out just for how tough he played the game. His grasp of psychology was so far ahead and his overall thinking about the game was unbelievable. He left a lot of belief behind him when he'd gone." And, in Malaysia, when they met again several months later, Waugh could put names to all the faces, which was almost equally impressive.

Though he shows no signs of slacking off yet, this will be Waugh's last tour of England. His daughter, Rosalie, now almost four, has seen so much of her father on television she calls him Steve Waugh, which must hurt. His son, Austin, is 18 months and a third child is due in September. "When you get on the plane, you think this is going to be a bit tougher than last time," says Waugh. "Then you come here and you feel fresh and ready to go. When we got to Lord's, I was with Wade Seccombe, who has never been there before, and I was showing him the Long Room and we walked out on to the pitch and I could see what a great experience it was for him. This is still the best tour to be on."

The Waugh games have already started. Four slips and no third man for McGrath's first over at Old Trafford on Thursday evening. "We want to stay one step ahead of the opposition, we want to think differently and do things differently. We know how good we can be and once we know that we want to stay at that level. There is nothing more frustrating than wasting talent or not performing as well as we should." Waugh has moulded a team in his own image and that, too, is a terrifying thought.