Adam Hollioake, mischief never far from the surface, offers a classic one-two combination to the question of why Surrey are so successful. “Because we’re the best. And the most humble.”

He breaks into his laconic, deep-throated chuckle. It’s good to hear him laugh in the midst of a summer marked by a tragedy which has cast a shadow over the English game, particularly at the Oval, where the late Graham Thorpe and Hollioake combined to help Surrey win seven trophies between 1996-2002.

Hollioake is no stranger to grief. It was the death of his brother, Ben, in a car accident in 2002 that ultimately led him to walk away from cricket and return to his native Australia at the age of 33.

“I’ve had plenty of net practice, getting used to it,” he says now, talking from his place in London, where he’s resided all summer. “It’s getting those phone calls, when someone rings and the moment between realising this isn’t a good phone call and then getting the news seems to take forever. As soon as I had the phone call, I knew it was one of those. It does bring back memories of others, my brother and [former Surrey wicketkeeper] Graham Kersey and people that we’ve lost along the way.

“I was very close to Graham [Thorpe]. We were close when we played, but I got very close with him in the last five or six years and when we were coaching together. One thing that kind of distracts you from your own sadness or emotion is trying to take care of others. So I’ve been trying to help out his wife and kids and take responsibility for them. I know that’s what Graham would want.”

With his doctorate in grief, Hollioake has become, he says, “a master” at picking out the happy moments. “The fun guy that [Thorpe] was, very silly, with a playful sense of humour. The other one is the fierce competitor who really locked on when the game got close. When the pressure’s on and the game’s in the balance, some people haven’t got it, and he was definitely one who did.”

He recalls that Thorpe could at times be quite distracted if you were talking to him off the field. “He’d be playing with his bat handle, or be a little bit fidgety.” But when they were together in the middle, mid-pitch, mid-battle, Thorpe was a different man. “He’d be locked on. He’d be staring you straight in the eyes, quietly spoken but confident, urging me to stay with him and be there at the end of the game. He was one of my favourite people to bat with.”

Twenty years after abandoning his playing career, Hollioake has spent the summer as an assistant coach at Surrey, brought back into the fold by Alec Stewart, who will stand down as the club’s director of cricket at the end of a season in which the club is gunning for a third straight County Championship trophy.

“It really does feel like coming home,” he says. Hollioake’s early years in Australia were a blur of constant travel, multiple schools, an unsettled, peripatetic upbringing. “I didn’t have a family home growing up, because we moved so much.”

Arriving at Surrey as a brash young all-rounder in the early-1990s, Hollioake discovered the joys of stability. “I had the 15 years at Surrey, and that was the one consistent that I had. And then, since finishing at Surrey, I changed where I live a couple of times, and had many different roles and jobs. I walk into the Oval and it’s probably the place I’ve spent the most time in my life. Just the respect I get when I go there, and how good the people are. It does feel like a big family there, so it definitely feels like a homecoming.”

After leaving Surrey to be with his parents in Australia, the former England international embarked on a string of alternative careers. A real estate venture collapsed during the global financial crisis that hit in 2007, sending Hollioake bankrupt. He created a television show, Australia’s Greatest Athlete, which ran for three seasons. A stint as a professional boxer and then in Mixed Martial Arts followed. Cricket had faded into the background.

“I was trying to work out, ‘Hey, what am I going to do now? What am I? What do I want?’ Have you heard of that show Through The Keyhole? They came to my house and they couldn’t find anything to do with cricket. They said: ‘We have to plant some stuff, because the viewers aren’t gonna guess whose house this is if we don’t have something.’ I didn’t have any memorabilia in my house. And then I realised that it’s because I don’t want to live in the past. I want to achieve more, because those memories are pretty powerful, and if you start living on what you’ve achieved, then you can quite quickly become a prisoner of your past.”

He feels that cricket was “taken away” from him by Ben’s death. “When my brother died, I felt I needed to go back and be with my family and look after them. And then I ostracised myself a bit from the game and during that time I lost my connection with cricket. I’m still building that back, like a relationship.

“I walked out on cricket 20 years ago and I guess I’m building my confidence back with it. I love cricket. It’s given me everything, all the start in life that I needed. So I want to be back involved, and I want to see what I can achieve in it again.”

Coaching jobs provided a way back into the game, with Queensland, Pakistan, and with the ECB, with both England Lions and the Test side during the ill-fated 2021-22 Ashes tour, when he was reunited with Thorpe, who was England’s batting coach.

Another of his previous coaching roles involved working in the now defunct Afghanistan Premier League, when he came terrifyingly close to a suicide bombing in Kabul.

“There was a backpack terrorist. and it blew up nine people. I was between 50 and 100 metres away. It was brutal. But the people were amazing and it was such a big thing to have cricket in their country. When it happened, my first instinct was, I can’t wait to get the hell out of here. And a lot of the guys did leave. But then I thought, ‘no’. My dad always said to me growing up, stay until the job’s done. I wanted to make sure I was safe and they increased security. But it was pretty full on.”

Hollioake tries to bring the same philosophy to coaching that he brought to captaincy and to life in general. In 1995, as a young star with leadership potential at Surrey, Dave Gilbert, then the club’s head coach, gave him the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. “He said to me: ‘I read it once a year.’ So I read that book, and I became fascinated with psychology. I’m a bit of a deep thinker myself and the difference between myself when I’m confident and when I’m lacking confidence is vast. We spend all this time as players trying to improve 1% but the difference between yourself when you’re confident and when you’re not confident is more like 20%. If you took 11 people that were confident and played them against their clones who were not confident, it’d be a whitewash, because confidence is such an integral part of sport.”

He references the effect of Bazball. “It removes the fear of failure, and that happens when you’re confident. As a captain, I understood that from a pretty early age, and I’ve definitely taken that into my coaching.”

We return to the question of how and why Surrey’s culture of success continues to flow from his playing days to the here and now.

“What’s struck me is how organised and professional they are. Everyone’s so informed, and knows what everyone’s doing. That’s a mixture of Alec Stewart and his organisational skills and professionalism and having a settled squad, which is also down to Alec. If I look at the one common denominator, in the last 30 or 40 years, I would say Alec Stewart’s been pivotal. The communication’s outstanding, and it just seems to be a well-oiled unit.”

At the beginning of his career, he says, there was “almost zero” professionalism. “By 2004 there was the beginning of a bit more science, bit more professionalism, bit more support off the field. Now you’ve got a couple of physios, strength and conditioning coaches, psychologists, statistician, batting coach, five or six assistant coaches and Alec, so the support staff’s probably at least double figures. We’ve got a great system, we produce a Test cricketer every year. A constant flow of Test cricketers come through our youth system, and good ones as well. We’ve got a big ground, we’re attractive for people to come and play. So when we do sign a player, we sign a big player.” This season, Surrey have fielded 14 full England internationals.

Hollioake’s current role is temporary, but he would be open to returning. With Stewart’s imminent departure at the end of the campaign to care for his wife, who has cancer, Hollioake says he would be “honoured” to fulfil a similar role.

“I’m beholden to Surrey. I’ve been away for so long, but I do have that bond with the club. But I’ve got to be the right person for the job, because there are a lot of people who want to do that job, and there’ll be many good candidates for it as well. I want the best for the job before what’s best for me.

“Hopefully Alec chooses to stay involved in some advisory role. I know he’s not doing his full director of cricket role, but hopefully he stays and helps mentor the next person who comes on to take it and passes down some of the wisdom that he’s got, because he’s definitely Surrey’s greatest son.”

Most important to Hollioake is that, after years of grief and a search for purpose, cricket is a joy once more. “I lost the love of the game after my brother died, I wasn’t enjoying it anymore, but having had a bit of a time away from it, I’m loving it again. It’s hard for it not to be a lot of fun.”

This is an article from Wisden Cricket Monthly. Click here to get over 25% off an annual Wisden Cricket Monthly digital subscription.