Broad shoulders a heavy bowling burden

London: To meet Stuart Broad last week was to be reassured.

Not necessarily that England are going to retain the Ashes, although that does appear a rather fashionable viewpoint after Australia's 2-0 demise in India, but that there is going to be one hell of a scrap.

Australia are not the only enemy this winter; so too is meekness.

It has prevailed too often in the past. It won't do this time.

Not if Broad can help it. Forget the angelic features, he is an enforcer.

He talks of "dragging the team with him" at certain times, and you need only think only of the Ashes spell of five for 37 at the Oval in 2009 for evidence, or even the last one-day International of last summer at Southampton, where Pakistan had got a flier and a bristling Broad snared two quick wickets to turn the match.

And when he talks with relish of on-field confrontation — especially of his clash with Mitchell Johnson at Edgbaston last year — it is not with some forced pseudo-machismo.

"To be brutally honest, I thrive on it," he says.

Competitiveness

The bloke simply oozes competitiveness. Take the stuff about him and his father, Chris, whose three centuries in consecutive Tests precipitated England's last Ashes victory Down Under in 1986/87.

I expected him to express some boredom with it — all that stuff about having to watch the On Top Down Under video when he was younger — or at least that it had been hammed up to make some decent copy.

Not a bit of it. This is banter with knobs on. And Broad junior wants the final word.

"Even at the recent PCA [Professional Cricketers Association] awards,'' he says, "Dad got up on stage and Nasser Hussain said ‘So your son has got a higher Test score than you and has a hundred at Lord's with his name on the board.' And he replied: ‘I'm on three boards in Australia that he's not on!' So that's the challenge then."

And then there's Pakistan.

"I had a lot of aggression towards the Pakistan cricketers throughout that one-day series," Broad says with real feeling.

"Because, whether they were guilty or not, the allegations [of spot-fixing] had overshadowed our fantastic summer of cricket. Anything that gives negative press is harmful to the game. Even in that one-day series you'd see a misfield and there'd be sly comments, whether they were from friends or players. And that's not what you want for cricket. You want a 100 per cent battle, country on country. I think every player is excited about going to Australia because you know that's what you're going to get."

As for Ijaz Butt, well... "I was distraught at his comments," Broad says. "This was the head of their cricket board accusing us of cheating. We were so close to not playing, but I was keen to play because I wanted them to go home with nothing; to lose the Test series, lose the one-day series and have a completely miserable time. I think we did the right thing by playing on because we couldn't let a joker like that affect the dynamics of cricket. If we were to pull out of a series because of what one man said, it would have set a dangerous precedent."