He reluctantly left his immediate family behind to move to France at the age of just five with an uncle. The experience was character-forming if nothing else, and must have contributed to the big man's determination to persist with the career he set his heart on despite unpromising beginnings."It was difficult, but I was with my uncle, who was a professional footballer, and I was in France first to study," he recalled after a draining first session with his new club in the West Coast heat last Thurs- day. For a man who can leap so high - as Newcastle United will reluctantly testify following his spring-heeled header against them for Marseille in last season's Uefa Cup semi-final - Didier Drogba is reassuringly grounded. Like almost all of football's late developers, he tasted real life long before moving into the frequently unreal, cosseted world of professional sport and becoming last week the most expensive acquisition, at £24m, of Chelsea's unparalleled spending spree. And what a down-to-earth life it was, begun as the oldest of seven children in the Ivory Coast. Now they would claim they were letting him get accustomed to the rhythms of the dressing room again, and they might be right They might want his autograph.. Thirty bottles at £50 a time are now winging their way into the Strauss cellar.. A boy clutching an autograph book boarded the tube at St John's Wood station up the road from Lord's on Friday night.

Spotting his excitement, an older passenger asked: "D'ya get Brian Lara?" "Yeah," said the boy. "And Robert Key, what about him?" "Yeah, oh yeah, Rob Key, yeah, I got Key all right." The anticipation in one voice and the pleasure in the other were evident. Forty-eight hours earlier, the idea of Key being talked of in the next breath to the West Indies record-breaker would have been possible only if you were playing some obscure game, such as reeling off Test cricketers' names in reverse alphabetical order. Key himself would laugh wryly at the juxtaposition.Partly through experience, partly through nature, Key has long since been a phlegmatic soul. He likes a laugh, is gentle, not easily excited, keenly aware of the slings and arrows lying in wait and always ready with a mordantly amusing line, maybe or maybe not based on truth.In the diary of a season written by his Kent colleague Ed Smith and published last month, Key is spoken of with unabashed fondness for his sharp cynicism, not least by Smith's mum. He is one of those whom it is hard to dislike because they do not have envious bones in their body.Smith wrote of the time last year when Key, "quite out of character", remembered to bring some DVDs he had promised, and later that day bought him a paper from the corner shop.

Smith, surprised by the solicitousness, said: "Christ, Rob, steady on, not one favour in seven years and then two in one day." The reply: "Don't think it means I like you." The others laughed.Key has always looked the part, light on his feet with soft, sure hands That is why Kent gave him his debut at 18. He had stood out too - rather than being outstanding - because of his looks: a rosy-cheeked, round, friendly face above gently sloped shoulders and a torso that was and is never going to earn him a contract with a beachwear company, no matter what endorsement offers may come along now.He was always gifted and it may be that the cricket genes were passed down through his mother, Lynn. She bowled for Kent women's team and when Robert was little, she bowled at him in the back garden. But Key's personality, reflected in his approach at the crease, stood in his way. His host, Christopher Carson, head of Hardy's in Europe, promised him five cases of the premier Australian wine Jack Mann if Strauss made another Test hundred.He must have thought the booty was safe - surely Strauss could not score yet another Lord's century.