Adam Hollioake was not a popular guy. "It's probably fair to say that I'm not the easiest person to speak to on the circuit, nor overly friendly with opposition. I'm not someone who goes out of his way to have idle chitchat," he says. In the months following his brother Ben's death in March he discovered a new depth to cricket's fraternity. At the Professional Cricketers' Association awards dinner this September, he publicly acknowledged that fact as he thanked his peers for their kindnesses.

"I didn't expect people to be as warm as they were," Hollioake admits, his dark features out-brooding the man from the Gillette advert. He was surprised, too, by the sympathetic cheers from opposing crowds: "I'm not used to people liking me." His long eyelashes are cast demurely down at the tape recorder and rarely leave it. It is a strange show of reserve, at odds with the breezy confidence, the blaring African-chic shirt, the chunky necklace and the brown corduroy jacket on the back of his chair.

Perhaps it is caution after six months during which his heart has been publicly anatomised. His responses are assured but often opaque; the quasi-Australian burr emphasises the endings of his sentences with a finality that warns not to assume too much. So, although it is tempting to see in Hollioake a figure ennobled by sadness, his personal tragedy commingled with his playing persona, Hollioake insists his grieving was all done in private. "I think people like to think they know what you're going through but no one actually knows what another man's going through until they walk in his shoes. When I come out and I play cricket people see Adam Hollioake the cricketer but Adam Hollioake the person, the family man, is different to a lot of what people see."

Adam Hollioake the cricketer has had one hell of a year. When he returned to England at the beginning of June he had not picked up a bat for nine months. Having planned to leave his training late this year, the events that kept him in Australia denied him any pre-season practice. For a man used to spending hours in the nets it was a frightening experience. "It felt like I was holding an axe," Hollioake says, "In my first two innings back, for Surrey seconds, I thought, `I'm in trouble because I've forgotten how to bat.'" He need not have worried. In his Championship comeback game against Somerset he scored 87 off 83 balls and followed that with two speedy fifties against Warwickshire.

Then there were back-to-back innings that he admits surprised even himself. The first was a C&G quarter-final hundred against Sussex so violent it should have required a Parental Guidance certificate. After hitting 117 off 59 balls in a trance-like state, he walked off the field, "sat down and couldn't comprehend what I'd just done. It was shock more than enjoyment." According to newspapers, Hollioake's explanation was that Ben was batting for him. "I think that might have been misquoted," he replies. "I just said, 'That wasn't me, I can't bat that well.' And then the same thing happened just three days later."

This was the occasion of Hollioake's first Championship century in three years, made against Kent at a strike rate of 118. For the second time he found himself back in the pavilion unable to remember anything of the devastation he had just wreaked. Hollioake had hit the county circuit like a meteor and his blazing shower of runs continued to dazzle right through to September. People talked of a man reborn, re-focused, released – a new brand of Hollioake.

He considers this impassively. "As a person I've changed a lot," he agrees. "Over the last years I probably became a bit cynical and too scared of getting out. Now I have no fear of getting out, I have no fear of trying to hit the ball for six." Here lies his strength. "I convey that across to a lot of the bowlers and I think that puts them on the back foot straight away. It's pretty hard to bowl at a guy who doesn't care if he gets out or not."

Surrey have followed his example. The team's aggression stems from their collective fearlessness, a willingness to chance the improbable and the impossible with the verve of the comic book hero. "We believe we can do anything and, if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen," says Hollioake. "We don't worry or lose sleep over it or have endless meetings about it." After all, he points out, it is just a game. His 24 sixes over the course of the Championship season did not emerge from a tactical policy but because Hollioake was reclaiming his childhood enjoyment of the game, when one of his most compelling activities was hitting the ball over the garden fence.

When he first took over as captain, he admits, there were insecurity problems within the team. Even in their final game against Lancashire in 2000, when they needed a mere point to win the Championship, panic set in and the dressing room lost its belief, thinking up ever more desperate tactics to secure a point instead of a victory. This year, their faith in themselves inspired them to the highest fourth innings run chase in their history. On the last morning of their Championship game against Kent at Canterbury Surrey needed 140 runs with only three wickets in hand but Hollioake said nothing to the team. "I could feel we really believed we were going to win it. I just let the guys get on with it. Sometimes you can speak too much."

As captain, Hollioake abides by three rules: always listen to what people have got to say; don't always do the obvious thing; if in doubt, take the attacking option. This bears no small comparison with the Australian philosophy. "I don't think we say quite as much as they do," says Hollioake, smiling. But like Steve Waugh he is uncomfortable with losing. Missing out on a one-day trophy through a combination of poor tactical planning and a freak semi-final, Hollioake regrets that his team was "focused a little too hard on the Championship" and has already begun to address some of the issues for next year. His bowling too, uncoached until this year, has undergone some changes to mend flaws in his action. "Martin Bicknell said a couple of little things to me that made an immediate difference," he says, "but it's something I'll be looking at for the next season as well."

This winter, however, Hollioake will be back in Australia with his family for what will be an emotional Christmas. He plans to spend some time working on the Ben Hollioake Memorial Fund which raises money for a variety of charities, including Ben's favourite, the Battersea Dogs' Home. This season was, in retrospect, the final part of a mourning process, what he terms the "last piece of the jigsaw" as he put his shaken life back in place.

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