It's not easy bowling off-spin in one-day internationals with only five men allowed on the leg side.

Batsmen like Gary Kirsten, Boeta Dippenaar and Neil McKenzie have good techniques and can bat for long periods.

Politicians as diverse as Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe have been quoted at our team meetings. That is how political England cricket tours have become.

Above all, I want to captain England in more Test victories than anybody else.

If you try and cover all your bases, like the ECB tend to do, you end up with muddled decisions.

I played my first ever Test in Kingston in 1990. I'd just graduated from Durham University and there I was, at Sabina Park, playing Test cricket.

Normally I don't sleep much during a Test match.

Pressure is the biggest single factor in Test cricket.

I want to play 100 Test matches for England.

It's not an issue for me if I captain England in 42 Tests or in 50. It's a question of what is best for the team in Test and one-day cricket.

Captaining England is the best job I've ever had and the last thing I would want to do after more than four years is hand the Test job over to someone who wasn't up to it.

When I first became captain the job was new and refreshing and didn't affect my batting. I was still in the same mental pattern I had had for 10 years; batting came first and captaincy fitted in with that.

Learning how to win comes with switching the onus of pressure away from yourselves and then seizing your moment.

Pakistan is a very emotional, cricket-loving nation and what Pakistan need is a street-fighter-type in charge of the team.

I certainly do not want to be remembered as a good captain who perhaps didn't contribute with the bat as much as he might have done.

I think I've broken every finger, and my wrist on a tennis court in Guyana, and at 33 you get other injuries like hernias and tennis elbow.

Some would argue the opposite: that with better pitches you should be able to express yourself, a bit like Kevin Pietersen does. Looking back, I wish I had been a bit more like that. But I always had a fear of failure, a fear of getting out, so I tried to eliminate risk from my game.

With all my bats I like them to be bottom-heavy, so they help me to hold the line through the shot.

One-day cricket is about continuity, team ethic, understanding each other's role, where everybody fields and bats, when and at which end they want to bowl.

As a player you always feel the pressure and as a team you are always trying to make sure the opposition are under it.

Pujara is not fashionable, he's very much old-fashioned - he's not great between the wickets and he's not a modern, extravagant, in-your-face character like Kohli, Dhawan or Pandya.

I admired Stephen Fleming.

There have been a few times in my career when I have been close to tears after completing an innings, but rarely when I am waiting to bat.

Trescothick hates it if somebody starts taking the micky or running other people down - which can happen a lot in some dressing-rooms - and he makes sure he stamps it out.

I admire anyone who can show they can dig deep. Ballesteros and Sergio Garcia, people who are obviously mentally strong. Or Graham Thorpe. He is your fighter. He's the kid who is bullied at school but will stand up in a fight when it matters.

Sometimes we don't build up our own cricketers enough.

In the longer term we have got to learn how to bowl on flat pitches if England are to head the ICC Championship table.

You should not be flat playing for your country.

I played with Graham Thorpe and Alec Stewart; if anything off the field affected Graham his cricket life was not important and you had to give him a break. But if Alec had issues at home you would never know about it; he would turn up and think: 'This is my job, I can do it.'

If you've got an opportunity to improve your squad before a World Cup you must take it.

I think Andrew Strauss never gets enough credit for what he's done for English cricket.

I haven't stuck my head out to be captain of England.

Off the field I always thought Mark Taylor was exemplary in the way he handled himself.

I am still disappointed when I have let myself down or my team. That will not change at any stage in the future.

From the age of eight until 15 or 16, every time I was out bowling leg spin I was thinking about my dad and when you've done that it stays with you. There are lots of things he did which enabled me to be the player that I was. It wasn't me that wanted to be a cricketer. He made me 90 per cent of the player I was and the person I was.

My relationship with my dad is everything.

With my bowling, I didn't know how I was doing it, so when it went wrong I didn't know how to fix it.

Bowling was my natural skill. I didn't know how I was doing it, but I was spinning it miles and bamboozling people.

When you are no longer England captain, you suddenly realise it's over, you are no longer England captain, and you appreciate what you had.

More than playing, my greatest moments and love of the game come from captaining England.

Being in charge of a team is just like having kids.

The closer I got to Essex 2nds, the more technical I got with my batting.

I had good and bad seasons for Essex. I was a real form player: if I got on a run, I was happy and confident, but if I had a bad trot, I was far too analytical of my game, worried about it too much and my form got worse.

When I see people like Pietersen bat, I wish that I'd freed up a bit as a batsman, but it's very easy to say now.

I've played cricket seriously since I was eight years old, when I first played for the Essex under-11s. I can't just turn it off.

I've been married a long time.

I have applied to go to either Durham or Loughborough University to study Applied Physics and would like to get some qualification behind me. But when I do think about becoming professional Essex would be my first choice as I have been very happy playing and practising with them.

I went to Spain with my brother when I was about 17. We stayed near Barcelona and it was terrible. There were floods and I ended up missing my flight home.

I enjoy India whenever I go and Sri Lankans are overwhelmingly friendly.

There are lots of places I would love to go to in Europe and North America.