Tim de Lisle: Vaughan blameless after England fail to plan for Hussain's succession

At Lord's last Saturday lunchtime, the marching band in their red coats played "YMCA" (the members do like a little gay hedonism with their Pimm's). It was instrumental, of course, but you could hear the words in your head. "Young man, there's no need to feel down / I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground..." Michael Vaughan clearly has to pick himself off the ground now, along with his team. Whether he needs to feel down is more debatable.

Thrown in closer to the deep end than any England captain in living memory, Vaughan sank more often than he swam. At the crease, he tried too hard to play his natural game, and ended up regressing to the overheated stage he passed through 18 months ago on the way to perfection. He saw the new ball off in both innings, only to get out in gormless ways. On Thursday, with wickets tumbling at the other end, he had the chance to launch his captaincy with a stirring recovery, as Tony Greig did at Lord's in 1975, coming in at 49 for 4 against Lillee and Thomson and making 96. Instead, Vaughan fell straight into the trap set for the hook shot.

On Sunday, he contrived an even less captain-like dismissal. He chased a wide one from Andrew Hall and was dropped at slip by Shaun Pollock. This should have been as big a let-off as Nasser Hussain dropping Graeme Smith on 8: the kind of mistake for which you pay a three-figure sum. But within two minutes, Hall sent down another wide half-volley and Vaughan, perhaps exhausted after those long days in the field, made exactly the same blunder. When he gave his team a lecture about not being hungry enough, you wonder if he included himself.

In the field, his captaincy was pallid and bland. He set largely orthodox fields, give or take the odd second gully, and bowled Anthony McGrath's modest medium-pace at the start of play on Saturday, giving Smith and Boeta Dippenaar a net rather than keeping McGrath back to starve them of pace once they were used to the ball coming on to the bat. And he didn't bowl himself at all. If you don't use a respectable part-time off-spinner at 380 for 1, with two left-handers in, when do you?

In the one-day series, one of Vaughan's strengths was the way he attacked in mid-innings, making things happen by bringing back James Anderson and giving him some slips, but in the Test he tended to cling to his stock bowlers like a shy five-year-old clutching his mum's leg. The two bowlers with the worst strike rates, Andrew Flintoff and Ashley Giles, bowled 40 and 43 overs respectively. Anderson was given only 27, Steve Harmison 22, Darren Gough 28. Yet the most incisive bowling came, circa 500 for 2, from Anderson, who confirmed his ability to bounce back from a poor start with a spell of 7-3-12-1.

It wasn't Vaughan's fault that other batsmen played shots as feckless as his, that the slip fielders, buffeted by the change of captaincy, revisited the horrors of the 2001 Ashes, or that the seamers failed to plug away at Smith's one obvious weakness - a tendency to play half-volleys outside off-stump with a crooked bat and too much bottom hand, which causes him to inside-edge. It wasn't even Vaughan's fault that his tactics were poor. The blame lies more with the previous regime.

Hussain and Duncan Fletcher, a strong partnership in so many ways, were never much good at planning for the succession. Hussain never had an official vice-captain. When Hussain was injured, he was replaced at different times by Alec Stewart, Graham Thorpe, Mike Atherton, Marcus Trescothick, and Stewart again; never by Vaughan. Instead of a vice-captain, there was a management committee, which worked well most of the time, making each constituency in the team - young and old, bowlers and batters, pace and spin - feel represented at top table. But it was significant that in Hussain's last Test, the committee consisted of Trescothick, Vaughan and Giles. In a curious oversight, it didn't include one of the seam bowlers, the men who were going to have to win the match.

Groomed as a future England captain all the way to the A team, Vaughan was then offered no further training. He led England out in a Lord's Test against the second-best team in the world having not captained in a single first-class match for four years. If he wasn't much good, it's because he was unprepared.

As a batsman, Vaughan has shown the ability to make a quantum leap. Now he needs to do the same with his captaincy. It would have been a lot easier later in the year, against the no-hopers of Bangladesh. After landing him in it, Nasser owes him a few more fighting innings like his fine 61 at Lord's.

England are now patently the underdogs in this series. South Africa have won 10 of their last 11 Tests, seven of them by an innings. They are as good as Australia against everyone except Australia, who turn them into England. Since they were last here in 1998, they have lost only eight Tests out of 51, two of them dead matches and five against Australia, so in five years, they have lost only one live Test against any team not wearing baggy green caps. And that was because Muttiah Muralitharan took 13 wickets. Vaughan's England will be doing well if they avoid a hammering.

Tim de Lisle, editor of Wisden 2003.
timdelisle62@hotmail.com