The passage of events that led the England wicket-keeper Matt Prior to Antigua, where on Saturday, thanks to the patronage of a Test cricket-hating Texan billionaire, he and his England team-mates will play a three-hour game for a financial prize that almost makes one glad that Fred Trueman is no longer around to pass comment, began at Heathrow Airport on 3 September 1993.
That was the day on which 11-year-old Matthew, an only child, arrived with his parents from Johannesburg to begin a new life in the old country. He still remembers the day vividly. To start with, it was raining. And over the following weeks and months, it felt as if he had his own personal rain cloud stationed permanently above his head. His mum and dad separated. At Dorothy Stringer High School in Brighton he stood out like a sore South African thumb. Then his mother found that she had an aggressive form of breast cancer.
"Cricket was my escape," he tells me. "I would go out to bat, and I felt that the longer I batted, the longer I didn't have to think about anything else. My mum was having chemotherapy, and anyone who's had a loved one go through that ... it's horrible seeing this chemical making them go grey, literally grey."
Those were harrowing years, but Prior looks back on them now, with his mother mercifully restored to good health, knowing that the experience was formative not only for his cricket but also for his character. Yet it is his character that has been questioned these past 12 months or so, with accusations of boorishness, and worse, behind the stumps. He was No 1 suspect in the absurd episode when jelly beans were scattered on the crease as the Indian tail-ender Zaheer Khan came out to bat in a Test match at Trent Bridge 15 months ago, and he is also the man credited with the crassest of sledges, reportedly saying to Sachin Tendulkar, "I drive a Porsche, what car do you drive?"
Sitting in crepuscular light in a central London hotel a couple of days before the flight to Antigua, Prior robustly, and convincingly, protests his innocence of both these transgressions. He seems like an engaging and eloquent young man, and clearly life has equipped him to look after himself. When we turn to the Stanford Super Series, however, he is discouraged from talking for himself. His agent, who ever so slightly bizarrely is the former Crystal Palace manager Alan Smith, stops his frantic BlackBerrying practically every time I bring up Twenty20 to interject with "I don't think we'll answer that one" or "that's not for Matt to say". With $1m a man on offer, maybe such sensitivity is understandable. But it seems a shame to inject a faintly neurotic note into what is otherwise a stimulating, free-ranging conversation.
Whatever, some of my questions sneak through Smith's obdurate defence, and so do some of Prior's answers. In the England get-together at Henley earlier this month, he says, the players looked at the schedule over the next 12 months and concluded that "from a cricketing point of view, Stanford is very low on the list". It was at Henley that Kevin Pietersen first issued his cri de coeur about triumphalism, telling his players that if they win they must bear in mind the severely credit-crunched cricket fan and react with due restraint. "Everyone knows how much money there is on the game," Prior says, "but we'll take a lot away from the way we behave whether we win or lose. Our motivation is to win games of cricket for England."
These are fine but disingenuous words. If the Stanford game is "very low on the list", cricket-wise, then the principal motivation in Antigua will surely be the dosh. I ask him whether he has mentally spent his winnings already. "I haven't even thought about it," he says, before Smith can butt in. "And that's the truth. I'm working as hard as possible to get a central contract, and the Stanford game is another opportunity to play for England. I don't see it as a lottery ticket."
Nevertheless, he must be delighted to have entered his cricketing prime at just the right time? "Yeah, the IPL has changed everyone's limits. It's really, really exciting to be a cricketer in this day and age, but I don't just mean the money. The level of everything is going up; training, skills, everything."
On the rise too is the number of South Africa-born England cricketers. With Pietersen and Andrew Strauss, Prior makes three. I ask him whether this is mere coincidence, or something to do with early South African conditioning. "Probably coincidence," he says, "although I did get that competitive spirit at a very early age. I went to King Edward's [King Edward VII in Johannesburg, also the Alma Mater of Gary Player, Ali Bacher, Graeme Smith and assorted other South African sporting heroes] and from the time I started playing cricket, aged eight, I played to win. We didn't play for enjoyment. The enjoyment came when we won a game. It was only when I came here that I experienced the idea that sport is more about taking part."
Prior's head was not turned by these unfamiliar Corinthian values, however. The competitiveness stayed with him, and when he left Dorothy Stringer, getting into Brighton College on a sports scholarship, England began to seem a little less alien.
"I'd been really looking forward to coming to live in England," he recalls. "My dad was born here and English football was my passion. I'd visited once when I was five – I had an aunt living in London – and I'd found it so different, so cold, so exciting. But I didn't realise how tough it was going to be. The three of us left South Africa, and here it wasn't the three of us any more. Then my mum got ill... sometimes she said we should go back, but even if we had, everything had changed. I remember meeting someone else from South Africa soon after we got here. They said it takes five years to feel at home in England, and they were exactly right. After five years, almost to the day, I thought, 'OK, this is home now'."
There must be times, I venture, when he summons up the memory of those five years of disorientation, and the intense misery wrought by his parents' separation and his mother's illness, to help him cope with setbacks now. "Yeah," he says, eagerly. "It's hard as a sportsman to keep everything in perspective. You end up feeling that it's the end of the world if you don't get runs, but I've always known that things could be a lot worse."
That said, he found it hard to apply this philosophy when he was getting slated last summer; 'Matt Prior the buffoon should grow up' was the headline in one national newspaper in the wake of Jelly Beangate.
"It was character assassination," he says, "by people who didn't even know me. I looked at this image that was being created and I thought, 'This isn't me. And if it is, I'm doing something horribly wrong'."
He fiddles, nervously, with the cuff of his jacket. He is in his best bib and tucker because following our interview he is due to attend a function hosted by the law firm Thomas Eggar, for whom Prior acts as an "ambassador"; such are the multifarious demands on an international cricketer's time these days.
"People who do know me know that if I muck up I hold my hand up and admit it," he continues, "but I was being accused of stuff I hadn't even done. That Porsche comment ... why would I say that to Tendulkar? He's got aeroplanes.
"What happened was that we'd had a long day in the field the day before, and I said something about keeping our npower energy up, which was picked up by the stump mic, and because npower were the sponsors, there was a bottle of champagne in my kit bag the next day. Well, at the time Alastair Cook wanted a new TV, so next day he's at short leg going 'Bang & Olufsen, Bang & Olufsen, great televisions' and I think Porsche Carreras are great cars, so that's why I mentioned Porsche. It wasn't a sledge but that quote made me look such an average person. I don't mind if people think I'm an average cricketer, but I don't like to be thought an average person."
"Average" seems a strange word to use in this context, yet somehow apt from a cricketer, for whom averages are all-important. As a batsman, Prior averages over 40 in Test cricket, but the jury is still out, and the England selectors still unconvinced, on his wicketkeeping.
"I know I have the reflexes and ability to do special things," he says, "but I need consistency. I've talked a lot to Alec Stewart [Alan Smith's partner in the agency that manages him], which has been really helpful. Stewie told me that when he played for England all he heard was that Jack Russell should be keeping, but the day he retired, Alec Stewart was suddenly the best wicketkeeper/batsman ever. That was an important message for me. It shows that there are highs and lows whoever you are.
"I've also been working very hard with [former England wicketkeeper] Bruce French, who has made me realise that as a keeper I need to be Matt Prior, not Jack Russell, or Alec Stewart, or Bruce French. I need to find my own method. Because there are two basic styles. The traditional English keeper stands still, and catches in the middle of his body. Then there's the Australian style, taking the ball on the inside hip with a lot more movement, like [Adam] Gilchrist, [Ian] Healey, Brendon McCullum, [Mark] Boucher.
"I used to be a mixture. At Sussex I worked with Peter Moores, who has a very English style, but at the Academy I worked with Rod Marsh. I found that I'd be catching one ball English-style, the next Australian-style. So now I've gone more the Australian way. I like that movement, it gives me a rhythm. I used to spend 70 per cent of my time working at my batting, and 30 per cent on my keeping, but I've flipped that around now."
At Lord's against the West Indies in that roller-coaster summer of 2007, Prior scored a century on his Test debut, the first England wicketkeeper to do so. I ask whether he would rather, let's say in next summer's Ashes, score a century or take 10 catches in an innings?
A long, slow exhalation of breath. "I love scoring centuries. Scoring a hundred in an Ashes Test match would be incredible. But if you ask would I rather score a hundred and draw, or take 10 catches and win, I'll take the 10 catches. The thing about catches, with that half-chance that sticks, is the fact that you've helped a mate out. Some guy running in in India, in boiling hot conditions, on a flat wicket ... your catch pulls 11 blokes together."
Or breaks 11 blokes' hearts if you spill it, I rather cruelly add. "Yeah, that's terrible. But I will drop catches, I will miss stumpings, and the thing is to make sure it doesn't ruin your day. There's a skill to dropping a catch, in a funny way. You can kick the ground, and everyone goes, 'Oh yeah, he's dropped a catch'. Or you can pick it up quickly, throw it to first slip, clap your hands, and people say, 'Was that a drop?' It's not covering a mistake, it's staying in a positive mindset."
Our interview is drawing to a close, with Smith back at his BlackBerry seemingly confident that there won't be any more nasty Twenty20 questions. The anxious presence now is a PR woman, who wonders whether we have mentioned Thomas Eggar enough. So I raise the law firm again and Prior says it's great to have them handling his off-field affairs, especially with him due to become a father for the first time next spring. They have just drawn up his will, he adds, and I suggest that on the forthcoming tour to India he might need it. He might get run over by Tendulkar in his Porsche. Prior obliges me with a laugh, but whether his eyes are smiling I cannot see through the late-afternoon gloom.
Matt Prior by numbers
126
Score on Test debut against West Indies at Lord's in May 2007, becoming the first wicketkeeper to hit a century on his England Test debut.
1,158
Runs when top-scoring for Sussex in the 2004 season, including 201 not out v Loughborough UCCE.
6
Catches taken in a one-day match against South Africa in 2008.
590
Runs scored in 28 one-day internationals for England.
562
Runs scored in 10 Test matches.
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