“Sorry, but that’s fake news.” Chris Woakes is responding to the rumour spread by a couple of mischievous team-mates, who will remain nameless, that his carefully groomed look is the result of having a haircut once a week. “Having said that, the lads do call me ‘Lego Lid’ because my hair doesn’t move.”

Woakes is one of those “Mr Perfect” players. A nice guy, immaculately turned out, who, in a different era, would not have looked out of place wearing a dinner suit out on the town with Keith Miller and Denis Compton.

The comparison is apt, not because he shares their bon vivant ways, but for his bravery and skill as a cricketer, traits that won him the Compton-Miller Medal as the best player of the 2023 Ashes for his 19 wickets in three Tests.

In his newly published book, Woakes writes that the medal is one of his most treasured possessions because it embodies everything that mattered to him: playing and succeeding in Test cricket.

His autobiography, The Wizard, is an entertaining ride from a working-class, club-cricket upbringing through a career of two World Cup triumphs and 62 Tests, rewards that were the result of maximising his talent through hard work and always striving to be better. He recounts the early days of being terrified of Andy Flower, Kevin Pietersen giving him some stick and always being the Mr Nice Guy who was easier to drop than, say, other spikier characters who shared the new ball for England.

It is, of course, the end of his career, walking out to bat with his dislocated shoulder in a sling, pumped full of painkillers to face a fired-up India pace attack with England needing 17 to win the series at the Oval, that will be a lasting memory of his dedication to the cause.

He jumps up from his seat in a west London cafe and crouches down to show how he was going to bat left-handed if he faced a ball, which for those watching from behind the sofa thankfully did not happen. Apart from scampering a couple of very painful singles, which agonisingly jiggled his shoulder around in its sling, he never got on strike because Gus Atkinson was bowled trying to hit the winning six.

“In my head, what I was going to do was cover the stumps with both legs and if they bowled at my chest or head just try and wear it and take the blow. If it was on the stumps, I would try and French cricket it. The one thing I was not going to do was back away and let them obliterate my stumps. I knew they would go head or toes. In Test cricket you put yourself out there and have to take it.”

‘Chris Woakes isn’t in our plans…at all’

Woakes never played again for England. A few weeks later he had retired and the one dig he has in the book is at Rob Key, the team director, for the “shabby” handling of his axing. In a press conference, Key said: “Chris Woakes isn’t in our plans…at all.”

He is not the first to criticise England’s handling of such things. And as we have seen with James Anderson this week, cricket does not deal with endings very well. Woakes is not one to harbour a grudge over something that was clumsy, more than anything else.

“I understand the situation and have been in his shoes when doing interviews, like today, and you get asked a question right at the end and make a throwaway comment. I kinda get it but it was the line ‘at all’. That hurt. He effectively retired me off without giving me the opportunity to do it. He had bigger fish to fry than me at the time with the Ashes coming up.”

You do not play international cricket for 12 years without having a steely side, but there were times when it was easier to leave Woakes out because he would not kick up a stink. He pointed to the Ashes Test at Old Trafford in 2019 when he was dropped for Craig Overton. “[Stuart] Broady was really upset with that decision. He was more p---ed off than I was.”

Proves the point doesn’t it? “Yes, I guess, but I would much rather be known as a nice bloke than a s--- one, but at the same time part of me felt the perception did not help me.”

The one regret is not being more forceful as a senior player in the last few months of his time in the “Bazball” dressing room, when he witnessed the reckless charges to the line and wished he had said something. By his own admission, Woakes is not a controversialist, but he was an eyewitness to life around some big characters and by the time Bazball started to go wrong in the summer of 2025 he was respected enough to be listened to. As an example, he picked out the India Test at Edgbaston that summer when England were set 608 to win but instead of grinding out a draw, were bowled out in 68.1 overs on a good pitch.

“We should have blocked out for a draw, but it was so against the mantra of the team that I don’t think anyone even considered the draw. I look back at that and we only missed out by about a session. A session is not difficult to bat out on a flat pitch. There were other moments within games when, for example, teams would go into a bouncer plan and we were still trying to score at an aggressive rate when we just needed to see out a few overs, get them tired and go again.

“It is easy to sit here now and say, ‘Why didn’t you put your hand up and why didn’t you say anything?’ I certainly could have done it but it just felt like Baz [Brendon McCullum] and [Ben] Stokesy had done so much in installing that fearless approach that it would have been a weakness to do it or say it. It just would not have stuck anyway. ‘No, we’re so adamant that we are playing this way that occasionally you are going to have a negative comeback to move forward’. It just felt like it would not have stuck if I had said anything.”

‘You’re an England player 24/7’

Who wants to be the only one speaking up? “Exactly, you don’t want to be the lone wolf,” he says. Woakes was one of those players brought up in the Flower era and his book reveals the difference between then and the more touchy-feely era of now when players have more power thanks to franchise wages. After a bad net at the Oval, Woakes reveals Flower stormed down the pitch and grabbed him by the grille. “You’re not watching the ball, you little f---. Watch the f---ing ball. Watch it closely. And next time, f---ing sweep it. You hear?”

Would the drinking scandals that emerged after Woakes’s retirement have occurred on Flower’s watch, with that kind of approach to player discipline? “Definitely not. I was scarcely able to breathe under Flower. Andy was a tough, hard coach and sometimes in my opinion too harsh and extreme, but he also demanded standards on and off the pitch and that was a good lesson I learnt early on in my career. Maybe that has just been allowed to slide in the last year or so.”

Woakes says he never saw an England player “p---ed or hungover” on duty, but it is remarkable how standards declined so quickly to the point that just a few weeks after his last game, Harry Brook was thumped by a bouncer in the early hours before captaining England in a one-day international. Since then Stokes, Atkinson and Brydon Carse have also been caught in late-night dust-ups.

“When you are an England player you can have fun and a good time, but be respectful of the badge, the position you are in and, for me, you are on duty as an England player 24/7. I don’t know why that has changed. A lot of these younger players came in during the so-called Bazball era. They had loads of success early by being more relaxed, and doing what they want, but then I think that was taken for granted rather than when I went into the team for the first time and there were those senior players that were very clear on how you were supposed to be as an England player, role models as such.

“Over the last little while a lot of senior players have left the dressing room and there was a lack of direction from the senior group and [that] let standards slip.”

Does he agree there is drinking culture in English cricket, something Stokes has pointed to in the recent past? “There is an association with alcohol from grass roots that goes through the game. The way you have to remember is everyone in England cricket comes through club cricket so alcohol is associated with the game at a very early age. It has become the norm. But the flip side is the game has never been as professional as it is now. People still enjoy a drink but way less than I have seen before. It rears its head when silly things occur like we have seen in the last 12 months.”

Reflections on his career

The most moving part of the book is Woakes on the death of his father, Roger, while he was playing in the Indian Premier League (IPL). It reveals the sacrifices players make because cricket is unique in the time players spend away from home on the other side of the world. The insecurity of losing a place or contract can blind players to the more important things in life. Roger was 81, in poor health after recent surgery and back in hospital when Woakes went to the IPL. “It does eat away at me,” he says. “I wasn’t there for my mum.”

Roger never saw his son play overseas because claustrophobia prevented him going on a plane. He describes Roger as “old school”, but writes “he was overheard telling the chap in the bed next to him all about how his son played cricket for Warwickshire and England”. He now has a tattoo on his upper left arm of his dad in a flat cap with his hands behind his back. “It’s how he used to watch me play,” he says.

Woakes is already a thoughtful voice heard on Sky Sports and Test Match Special. A career in punditry would suit him although he will be sensitive to players’ feelings, up to a point. “Bob Willis once gave me nought out of 10 on his verdict programme. That hurt the ego”

He received an emailed apology from Bryan Henderson, Sky’s head of cricket. “To be honest I was one of those people who would laugh and find it funny when he gave someone nought out of 10. But as soon as it is you it is a different feeling.”

There is one part in the book where he criticises a Telegraph Sport headline on a piece written by colleague Tim Wigmore after two for 64 from 15 overs in the final Test of the Ashes tour of 2021-22: Chris Woakes’s Hobart horror-show proves England must only use him in home Tests.

I say the desk launched a hunt for the headline writer and blamed it on someone who has left. “Course they did,” he says with a smile. “People have their opinions and say you’re good at times and s--- at times. It is part of the job. It still doesn’t mean if you see it or hear it that it doesn’t sting a bit.”

Woakes could take it and nobody at the end of his career would give him nought out of 10. Willis would have been proud of his fellow Warwickshire bear. A definite eight at least.