“I think in South Africa it’s more a case of third-slip wickets rather than mid-wicket wickets.” Talking cricket with Stuart Broad for half-an-hour is a deliciously pure exercise, and it’s one he seems to enjoy just as much as his lucky interviewer.

Cross-seam, angles, wide yorkers, bowler-protection, enforcement – all talked about with great enthusiasm and yet this was the last of a day of interviews Broad was doing as he launches Bowled Over: my side of the story, his autobiography. You walk out the room feeling that this guy relishes the multiple skills of his sport, and that nothing will shake his focus from them.

Broad was talking all things fast bowling for an upcoming issue of TWC in which he will reveal his top tips for that particular art. Advice is one of Broad’s main strengths, and not just giving it. “It’s a crucial skill to filter advice,” he says. This comes from someone who, from a very young age, will have been told what he needs to do so many times from so many different sources.

Within 30 minutes Broad reels off the names of Mushtaq Ahmed, Duncan Fletcher, Glenn McGrath, Peter Moores, Kevin Pietersen, Paul Collingwood, Frank Hayes (his school coach) and his parents – all from whom he has taken advice, some little nuggets, others more sweeping. He says he will “always listen” but ultimately “you need to know within yourself what your strengths are.”

The clear-minded Broad (still only 23) seems a magical sponge – able to absorb the best bits and reject anything that will adversely affect his game. He did, it’s true, briefly take on a more chest-on bowling action that seemed to upset his success. But Broad quickly reverted to his natural approach and ended up delivering the most important spell of the Ashes.

His ability to filter advice and ally it with an inner conviction in his own beliefs is ideal for a bowler who was in the England team within a year of making his first-class debut and whose role has flittered between, in his own words, “new-ball bowler, first change, enforcer, stock”.

Now to make it count once more on those third-slip wickets.

Benj Moorehead is editorial assistant of The Wisden Cricketer