Michael Vaughan: 'I questioned whether it was all worth it'

Michael Vaughan, the England cricket captain, is confident that he will lead the assault on the World Cup, and, despite being kept on the sidelines by injuries for most of the past 12 months, says that he never quite reached the stage at which he started to plot an alternative future, never quite mentally positioned himself in the Sky Sports commentary box, the cramped but jolly retirement home for former England captains. "But another injury or two and I might," he adds, and reflects on the lowest point in the trough of despond into which any sportsman with a long-term injury is pitched.

"Around last August or September when the knee didn't seem to be progressing, I'd just been told that I was out of the Ashes series, and someone else told me that I might not play again, that was a real low moment. And a few weeks ago when this [latest injury to his left hamstring] happened, I admit I questioned whether it was all worth it. I thought maybe someone somewhere was trying to tell me to do something else. But I'm pretty strong mentally, and the drive I've had all year getting back from the knee... I certainly won't let a little hamstring strain, tear, whatever you want to call it, stop me playing cricket again."

He assures me that the medical team are optimistic about his chances of being fit for England's opening game against New Zealand in St Lucia on 16 March, which is good news for all those, up to and including his stand-in Andrew Flintoff, who know that Vaughan's mental agility in the field could be vital if the team is to prosper. "I think Freddie [Flintoff] is delighted I'll be going to the Caribbean as captain," Vaughan says, matter-of-factly.

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Of course, fitness and astute captaincy is one thing, form and prolific run-making another. Vaughan's one-day record as a batsman is less than impressive even when he has been playing plenty of cricket, let alone when he has played hardly any. Before the World Cup there are two warm-up games, against Bermuda and Australia, which, with respect to Bermuda, and Australia's poor run notwithstanding, is like a boxer being asked to spar with Janette Krankie followed by Amir Khan. Vaughan concedes that he needs to do both. "I need to get some feel for batting," he says.

In the indoor nets at Lord's he looks assured enough with a bat in his hand, albeit only for the benefit of an excited gaggle of cricket fans who have each won a competition organised by the anti-perspirant manufacturers Sure Sport, their wonderful prize is to take part in a coaching session at Lord's with the England cricket captain. It is not a situation in which all top cricketers would be comfortable, but he seems cheerfully at ease, dutifully not perspiring even slightly and appearing every inch the urbane captain of his country.

Afterwards, I ask him whether he agrees with the widespread conviction that his return to the one-day side in Australia, brief as it was before his hamstring misbehaved again, was the telling factor in England's Lazarus-like resurrection in the Commonwealth Bank series. I do not expect him to concur, and nor does he.

"I never, ever say to anyone what my worth to the team is. The best people to ask are the players and the management. But I will say that at the beginning of the series I sat every player down individually. Some of them I'd not captained before and I always like to put across how I expect them to behave, how I expect them to train, what kind of roles they want, what roles we see them having."

Vaughan is looking at me intently, the intensity of his gaze somehow giving the impression that he is slightly cross-eyed. "We needed to go back to basics, to start afresh," he continues. "We'd not played well in one-day cricket for a year, and I felt we were trying to run before we could walk. Really, all we did in the finals was basic stuff, getting in a position to use the last 15 overs, putting the opposition under pressure with runs on the board. We were fortunate with a couple of tosses, but to beat Australia with no Pietersen, no Vaughan, no Anderson, no Lewis, Trescothick at home with his illness... to play well under that pressure was a great testament to young players like Plunkett and Mahmood."

It would have been some soothsayer, I venture, to have predicted during the disastrous Ashes campaign and in the early stages of the Commonwealth Bank series that England's cricketers would come home with something of a spring in their step. "Yeah, I was delighted with the way we reacted to a real low moment in Adelaide [when England were skittled out for 110 by Australia and lost by nine wickets]. A team with no character, a team that was mentally weak, or one that wasn't fully behind the coach, would have said, 'Right, that's the end of the tour.' We knew we faced a huge uphill task after that to reach the final, which would have been an achievement in itself. But what drove us on was people saying we wanted to go home. I never, ever felt that. I never felt it was a team that wanted an extra week at home. They wanted to stay in Australia and prove people wrong, which is exactly what they did.

"Look at Paul Collingwood. He got two hundreds and a 70, was man of the series, but if we hadn't reached the finals he would have come home on the back of a good start that ended poorly. Now Warney's said that he's England's key player. That shows how long a week in cricket can be to an individual and a team."

Indeed, indeed, and a nation rejoiced; but, before we even begin to reflect on the Ashes humiliation, what about Sir Viv Richards' observation earlier this week that England, just by overcoming Australia, have not suddenly become world-beaters, that the Aussies were simply tired?

"Well, we were just as tired as they were. But it's true that in this country, people get too excited when we win, and criticise too much when we lose. I know where we are as a one-day team. Only five weeks ago we were losing in Adelaide by heavy, heavy margins. Three weeks later we beat Australia in three consecutive games, which was great, but the conditions were in our favour. As soon as we get to the Caribbean the conditions will change again. We need to start thinking about a strategy and tactics to suit Caribbean conditions, not those we had in Australia."

OK, so who, bluntly, does he expect to win the World Cup? A ghost of a smile. "Every team can beat every other; I think it's going to be a real open World Cup. Whoever wins it always has one player who wasn't necessarily a star, or whose one-day record was not great, going into the tournament, like Andrew Symonds last time. The star players will play consistently well but one or two stars in the making will arrive. It's hard to predict who that team and those players will be.

"This World Cup could be the making of one or two of our players, but otherwise, looking around, the Sri Lankan batsman [Upul] Tharanga is an immense talent. He's got five one-day hundreds in the last year, plays with a free spirit at the top of the innings, and if him and [Sanath] Jayasuriya get going, the game gets away from you very quick."

For now, though, he is thinking only of himself and England. "We need to get the players knowing their roles, and to practise specific to the roles they are going to play." This sounds disconcertingly like management consultancy-speak, but then Vaughan's record as captain entitles him to show me flow graphs and Venn diagrams, if he wants.

"We need to make sure that pressure situations are not a hindrance but something we look forward to. If we need 60 off eight overs with five wickets left, the guys need to know we can do it, and not worry about what might be written, what might be said. If we get to the semi-final we've got a team that could go on and win it, but the hard bit is getting there."

He admits that the top of the England order, whether or not he finds form himself, does not match those of other teams for sheer brutality of shot-making. "But Kevin Pietersen's an immense player, and what we don't have at the top, a Jayasuriya or an [Adam] Gilchrist, we make up for with Pietersen, Freddie, Colly, JD [Jamie Dalrymple] in the middle. That's what we tried to do in Australia, set a base for those guys to express themselves in the last 20 overs.

"Having said that, we might have to have a plan B, because the team that wins the World Cup rarely gets to use plan A all the way through. Our plan B will be kept in-house, but let's say the batting order can't be set in stone."

And what of the captaincy? What are the challenges specific to one-day cricket? "Well, you have to know which bowlers you need to save for certain batsmen, and which guys are crucial in certain areas of the field. I always try to keep five men in the ring, which is a gamble during a run chase, because it allows them to play big shots. But the biggest thing that dries up runs is wickets. You've got to go for wickets."

Looking back, there was a decided scarcity of opposition wickets during the Ashes, which Vaughan watched even more disconsolately than the rest of us. It has been written, not least in these pages, that the seeds of crushing defeat were sown in the immediate aftermath of victory, the MBEs (or OBE in the captain's case) and so on rather suggesting that it was not just the stairs of the victory bus that had been scaled, but the very summit of achievement.

To my surprise, Vaughan sort of agrees. "I will say that I worry more about the team when we win than when we lose," he says. "When we lose and get criticism we have a real scrappy mentality, that we're going to prove people wrong. We're good at that, whereas praise, headlines, being given things ... it's actually harder to cope with being told you're great than being told you're crap, because when you're crap you've got nowhere to go but up. And as a nation we like to think we've achieved things without looking at the next challenge.

"But look at Alex Ferguson, the way he keeps getting knocks but keeps coming back and producing even more talented teams. I hope now that the 5-0 drubbing in the Ashes will be the reality check we need to become a really good team."

And seeing the urn snatched away so mercilessly, was it, as an onlooker, almost physically painful, knowing how hard he had worked to get his hands on it? "Yeah, it was weird. I was in a box on that first day in Brisbane, and Harmy [Steve Harmison]... we talk about setting a tone in any game, it's so important, so to do that [bowl the first ball of the series straight to Flintoff at second slip]... you have to be in charge of your game when you're under pressure like that.

"If you're batting, however nervous you are, you have to be in control of what you can control, which is stance, backlift and movement. If you are, then the sound of the crowd, the cameras, mean nothing. Steve, as he's the first to admit, wasn't in control. It was a great toss for them to win but we knew we had to hit them hard. Even though we lost the first Test here [in 2005], we got 20 wickets and hit a few of them on the head. We made indentations into their minds. In Brisbane we didn't do any of that."

He knew the Ashes were gone on the dramatic last day at Adelaide, when England went two down. "That killed us. There was no way back. We had them by the balls on day three, allowed them back on day four, but should still have controlled the game on day five. But when you play Australia in Test match cricket you don't have the easy hours. Against other teams you get hours, sometimes sessions, that are quite easy to control as captain. Not with Australia."

In one-day cricket, by contrast, they are a pushover.

Michael Vaughan is working with Sure Sport For Men - the anti-leak grooming range engineered for sports fanatics and the kitbag

Leading from the front: Vaughan's international career in numbers

Born 29 October 1974, Manchester.

Joined Yorkshire 1981.

Test debut South Africa v England, November 1999.

Career Statistics:

Tests 64. Runs 4,595.

Batting average 42.94.

100s 15. 50s 14.

Top score 197.

Overs bowled 156.

Wickets 6.

Bowling average 89.50.

5 wickets in innings 0.

10 wickets in match 0.

Best bowling 2-71.

Catches 37.

ODIs: Matches 77. Runs 1,773.

Batting average 27.70.

100s 0. 50s 15.

Top score 90 not out.

Overs bowled 110.4.

Wickets 12.

Bowling average 46.83.

5 wickets in innings 0.

10 wickets in match 0.

Best bowling 4-22.

Catches 24.