"I learnt how to be a team player on an Australian tour," says the former Victorian keeper-batsman, who is now 68. "I remember saying to Rod Marsh on the plane, 'You're No.1 keeper, I'm not trying to get your spot, I'm just here to learn. If you want me to keep three county games in a row I'll do it, whatever you want. My job is to make sure you're better equipped for the Test series."

Wade Seccombe was back-up to Adam Gilchrist in 2001, and spent more time running from grounds to team hotels after stumps – a welcome energy release after another long day of watching – than he did playing cricket. Over three months, he featured in just three three-day and two one-day games.

Being part of a team you're rarely in may drive a cricketer mad, yet Seccombe rates it a highlight of a career that includes being part of Queensland's first Sheffield Shield-winning team.

"Part of the gig is that, as the next best keeper, you're working with him, you've got to make him better," Seccombe says of his toil with Gilchrist. "Hopefully, he would reflect back and say I was a positive influence around him for that period and helped him prepare as well as he could, brought something to the table that made him better."

Darren Berry's experience in 1997 was different but left the same impression. "Chuck" had slipped his keeping gloves into the bottom of his suitcase before setting off on his honeymoon with wife Cath. In between European vacations he did some coaching at Macclesfield, where he'd played years earlier.

When Gilchrist – who was understudy to Ian Healy on that year's Ashes tour – hurt his knee, Berry was drafted into the squad. He tells the story at sportsman's nights that he weighed up his obligations "for three or four seconds", then put Cath on a plane home "and spent the next five weeks trying to break Ian Healy's hand".

Like Seccombe, the four games he played were as close as Berry came to realising a lifelong dream of being an Australian Test cricketer. He doesn't just share a nickname with his Queensland comrade, also a conviction that taking a second "stumper" to England is a tradition that must be upheld.

"We're a select few, the keeper's fraternity," Berry says. "There's only six who do this at the top level and the Ashes is the only real opportunity to get that experience of being around the Australian team. You're there if anything happens, you play a couple of matches, you've had the honour of being selected on an Ashes tour. I'd be disappointed if that stopped."

Batsmen and bowlers on the fringes of national honours will populate the English county circuit in unprecedented numbers this winter, encouraged by Cricket Australia to be fit, firing and a phone call away should misadventure strike the Ashes squad. In theory, Brad Haddin may be the sole gloveman in the touring party, but a keeper or two will be playing county or even league cricket just a motorway drive away.

That the national selectors intend to have a back-up back-stop in the tour party proper – and on the preceding two-Test tour of West Indies – pleases all in the select club Berry refers to, not least a current crop of state wicketkeepers who all have claims to an on-the-job tutorial with Haddin before one of them succeeds him permanently, most likely before the next home summer.

On the top line of betting are the untried Peter Nevill and Matthew Wade, desperate to add to his dozen Tests. Victoria's captain toured England in 2013, and remembers a series that immediately felt more substantial than any he'd been involved in over the previous year and a half with the national team.

"From my experience, to see it all unfold, to be in that country for a period of time and see all their facilities, face all our bowlers in those conditions, I think it was invaluable," Wade says. "It's the same as anywhere. If you go to India or the West Indies, experience on those grounds in those countries, you can't buy it."

Wade has eschewed the temptation to join the county caravan, at least in the early part of the English summer, instead backing himself to get the Ashes squad nod. The selectors have a big call to make, backing Wade to have improved his glovework sufficiently to be Haddin's long-term replacement, or plumping for Nevill (who at 29 is actually two years Wade's senior) and effectively anointing him as successor.

If they do go for Nevill – as Berry thinks they should for his highly competent glovework and batting good enough to average 45 in first class cricket – Robinson says the Ashes experience will be the perfect grounding. "For the development of that person for the future, it's very important."

Robinson toured England a second time, in 1977 with the pre-World Series Cricket party that lost 3-0, again as reserve to Marsh, but played three Tests alongside him as a batsman. Eighteen months later he was No.2 touring keeper on Australia's WSC tour of West Indies, in which he doubled as team manager. Further Test cricket eluded him, but he reflects that touring only improved his cricket.

Seccombe feels the same way. He reckons there were batsmen and bowlers on the 2001 tour who became frustrated at their lack of opportunity, but he went in knowing his place and determined to make the best of it, and for it to make him better.

"I probably just wanted to make every post a winner," Seccombe says. "If nothing else I wanted them to say, 'Look, this bloke's prepared himself, he's given himself every chance'."

Making an impression, Seccombe says, is an investment in the reserve wicketkeeper's future, one that will be looming large for whoever supports Haddin this year. "I wanted to show that who I was as a person as well as a cricketer fitted the ethos of the team," Seccombe says.

Berry never got the Test he craved, but he has a priceless memento of how close he came. His daughters are old enough now to ask what his baggy green cap means; he tells them there's no number inside, so probably not much.

"But I played for Australia on an Ashes tour." And that's a chance no wicketkeeper is going to spill.