by Tim de Lisle

84 matches, an average of 26, with not a single hundred - It is indeed a feeble record for Michael Vaughan, the England captain, though his numbers are similar with several other England captains in the past © AFP

For a batsman good enough to have been the world Test number one, Michael Vaughan has had a wretched World Cup. He opens England's batting, yet he goes into today's crunch game against South Africa with an average like a handy tailender (16) and the strike rate of a Seventies stonewaller (55). Vaughan has managed no fifties, no sixes, and only 15 fours off 203 balls. Of England's 1455 runs in the tournament, only 113 have come from his cultured bat. He has faced 75 more balls than England's new boy, Ravi Bopara, and made one more run. As World Cup openers go, he is the poor man's William Porterfield.

Anyone can have a bad trot, but this one has now lasted for most of Vaughan's one-day career: in 84 matches he has an average of 26, with not a single hundred. Even a Vaughan fan has to concede that it's a feeble record. But it's not just him. England captains never make many one-day runs.

The Wisden Cricketer magazine are running a competition to name England's all-time best (or least worst) one-day XI, and I was one of the people they roped in to make a selection. So I checked the stats and found that many of England's best-loved cricketers flopped with the bat while leading the one-day team.

Vaughan's average as captain is 28. That's decidedly better than Alec Stewart, who averaged 23 in 41 matches as one-day captain. It's better than David Gower, who managed a measly 25, and much the same as Graham Gooch, who steered England to the 1992 World Cup final but hardly led by example, averaging 29 as one-day captain. And it puts Andrew Flintoff in the shade: his average as captain is 17, with no fifties.

Vaughan's strike rate as captain is 65. Turgid stuff, but much the same as Stewart (64) and Mike Denness (63), and not as bad as Mike Atherton (59) or Gooch (55), let alone Mike Brearley (45). Even Graham Thorpe, a fine one-day finisher, managed just 58 in his three matches as captain. The only captains with strike rates over 80 are stand-ins - Allan Lamb, John Emburey, Marcus Trescothick, Andrew Strauss, Alan Knott and, bizarrely, Brian Close.

Nasser Hussain did slightly better than Vaughan, with an average of 31 and a strike rate of 70. Mike Gatting did slightly better still, with an average of 33 and a strike rate of 75 - hot stuff by the standards of the 1980s. But when it comes to hundreds, they're all about as bad as each other. In 465 matches, England's one-day captains have mustered only six centuries. Ricky Ponting gets that many every 18 months.

The only other major teams with as few as six hundreds are Pakistan, who have often been captained by fast bowlers (Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis), and South Africa, who have only been playing one-day internationals since 1991. All South Africa's six hundreds, curiously, have been made by Graeme Smith. Hansie Cronje never got one, although he made umpteen fifties. Neither England's captains nor South Africa's have ever made a World Cup hundred, a statistical curiosity which really ought to end today.

Most England supporters probably don't even know that Alec Stewart flopped with the bat as captain © AFP

Of the six one-day hundreds England captains have made, two were by Mike Atherton. Excellent innings they were too, each against a top attack - West Indies in 1995 and Australia in 1997. Atherton saw off Curtly Ambrose on a dewy morning at Lord's and Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne at The Oval. Maybe England should have valued him more highly. His record - average a shade under 34 - is a whole lot better than some of the men he has worked with in commentary boxes and in the England hierarchy. Geoff Boycott made three runs in two games as England one-day captain, Tony Greig five runs in two, Ray Illingworth five in three.

Those last few figures are just random bits of trivia, but overall there is a clear pattern. England captains don't make big one-day runs; they bat worse in one-dayers than in Tests. Why should this be?

It's partly that English coaching is geared to Test, not one-day cricket, stressing defence more than attack, orthodoxy rather than invention. To see Vaughan play his classical strokes, mostly straight to the man at mid-off, is like watching a Victorian watercolourist stumble into a party at Damien Hirst's.

It's partly the one-day cricket played by the counties, which is all quantity and not much quality. There are three one-day tournaments, which is at least one too many. The only one that makes players stronger and cleverer is Twenty20, and Duncan Fletcher seldom lets his big names join in the fun. Vaughan has played two Twenty20 games in his life, both for England.

England weren't wrong to pick Vaughan: he is worth a place, just, as a puppeteer alone

These factors apply to most England players. The difference with the captains is simply that they are England captain. It's a heavy burden to bear. You're being judged nearly all the time - but less so in one-dayers. Most England supporters probably don't even know that Gooch and Gower and Stewart flopped with the bat. Compared to the blazing limelight of Tests, a one-day series is a relative hiding place, little scrutinised by the press, soon forgotten by the fans.

The World Cup, of course, is different. And some England captains have raised their game accordingly - Gatting averaged 50 in 1987, Denness flourished briefly in 1975, and Stewart dragged his average up to 37 in various outings spread over 11 years. But they all captained in World Cups that came at the start of an international season. Vaughan, like Hussain in 2003 and Atherton in 1996, has the extra pressure of working with an exhausted rabble.

England weren't wrong to pick Vaughan: he is worth a place, just, as a puppeteer alone. Where they have blundered is in surrounding him with other slow-lane drivers. Fletcher's suggestion that opening with Flintoff or Pietersen would mean shifting four or five players is nonsense. Vaughan, Pietersen, Bell, Joyce, Flintoff, Collingwood: job done, with everyone in a position they're used to except Pietersen, who loves a new challenge.

In the long run, what all this shows is that England should have a separate one-day captain. There is a squeamishness about splitting the job which is quite misplaced. Australia have done it with huge success, keeping both teams growing and allowing first Steve Waugh, then Ponting, to get years of practice before taking over as Test captain. English resistance to it tends to be based on the idea that the Test captain wouldn't like it. Which goes straight back to the root of the problem.

Andrew Miller

Where it all began .... the scars of the 1992 World Cup final defeat still exist © Getty Images

There was Alec Stewart, worth his place for his strokeplay alone but utterly invaluable as a wicketkeeper and second-in-command to Gooch. There was Allan Lamb, as bristling a middle-order batsman as has ever existed, and a man who once stole an ODI for England by slamming Bruce Reid for 18 in the final over. And propping up the lower-middle order there was a quartet of genuine allround talent in Chris Lewis, Phil DeFreitas, Dermot Reeve and Derek Pringle.


It's the sort of multi-dimensional line-up that Duncan Fletcher has spent seven fruitless years trying to emulate. Even the No. 11, the job-a-day left-arm spinner, Richard Illingworth, had four first-class centuries to his name. Oh yeah, and then there was whatsitsname ... you know, thingummy ... that bloke who opened the batting and chipped in when needed with his portly medium-pacers. When the mighty Ian Botham is the weak link in your eleven, then you know you've got it sussed.

Graeme Hick was part of England's best one-day team © Getty Images

A fit Kevin Pietersen could change England's fortunes, but it's a big ask © Getty Images

Andrew Miller

A whole new ball-game? What a good idea © Getty Images

Anyone who claims that cricket journalism is an easy lark has obviously never had to sit and watch England make perpetual fools of themselves in the one-day arena. It really is the most soul-destroying of occupations. Day after day after day, the same old rubbish is served up for our delectation, with lashings and lashings of the same old failings and a side-order of the same old excuses, and we poor mugs try to turn this into the purplest of prose, trying to kid ourselves that we, they, you ... anyone ... actually gives a stuff.

As Andrew Flintoff might put it: "We're trying, we really are." So, deep breath, here we go for the umpteenth time this month.

"Today's pitiful batting performance at Adelaide was the most disgraceful showing by an England one-day team since ..."

Since, well, whenever. Whatever. Who cares? Not the England team, that's for sure, and therein lies the problem. Perhaps it's just the latest Machiavellian trick to emerge from those conniving spin-merchants at the ECB, but suddenly the team's 5-0 Ashes drubbing - their first whitewash against Australia for 86 years - seems like the high point of a miserable winter's campaign. It really has been that desperate.

Somehow, there is always a stigma attached to English defeats against New Zealand. England's farcical Ashes campaign in 1990-91, for instance, became even more embarrassing when they failed to overcome the Kiwis in both the Benson & Hedges World Series, and the subsequent three-match one-day tour.

And if that's the case, then today, the team took a significant stride towards completing their most ignominious tour of all time. But England better get used to the feeling. On March 16, in less than two months' time, their World Cup campaign gets underway against the same opponents in St Lucia, and on this evidence, they'll be lucky to put even Kenya, the former semi-finalists, and the John-Davison-powered Canada in their place.

In the meantime, the CB Series is providing quite enough spleen-venting among the press corps. One-day cricket brings everyone all out in a rash of adjectives. A quick scour of the wires reveals that, on other pages, England's latest performance has been described as "woeful", "desperate", "shambolic", "pathetic" and "flaky", as they were "hammered", "blitzed", "trounced" and "destroyed" by the "rampant", "buoyant" and "determined" Kiwis.

And to that, England might be expected to respond: "Bovvered?" Their attitude to one-day cricket is as fickle as the entourage of WAGs and infants that has been trailing around in the team's wake all winter, although - tellingly - there has been no-one in the set-up willing to have a good old-fashioned tantrum. A combination of Duncan Fletcher's impassivity and Andrew Flintoff's banality has seen to that. "The lads are trying their damnedest to win games," was Freddie's latest variation on the same soundbite, another infuriatingly deadpan response to a flatlining tour.

And when the cameras panned in on the dressing-room, Fletcher's hangdoggy-in-the-window expression was, to the average long-suffering England fan, every bit as slappable as Ricky Ponting had found it to be at Trent Bridge in 2005. Quite how the shunned Chris Read, sitting in fulminating silence beside him, resisted the temptation, no-one will ever know.

Last year, Fletcher infamously claimed that he knew "ten of the eleven players" whom he would like to have playing at St Lucia on March 16 for the opening match of the World Cup. For all we know, he still moans "Jonesy" and "Tresco" in his sleep to this day. But it's time to wake up and smell the coffee, Duncan. Those boys are gone, and they ain't coming back.

It's quite an irony, given the disparaging comments that Fletcher has long been making about county cricket, that three of the key figures as England claw their way to the start of another World Cup campaign, are Jon Lewis, Paul Nixon and Mal Loye - thirtysomethings one and all, and men who owe their very livelihoods to that maligned county treadmill. It's certainly not how England would have planned their winter. But seeing as they didn't actually bother to plan it in the first place, it seems about fair.

But enough pontificating about the same old spiel. It really is too depressing. Perhaps, in the spirit of this bloated, corporatised era of the game, it's time to automate our reports on these abominable contests. In fact, why wait for the technology to catch up? There is already in existence a handy 'bullshit generator' that, with a couple of quick tweaks, could easily churn out 700 words for next Friday's 252-run defeat against the Aussies.

I've been playing with it for the last five minutes and the machine has already identified three of Team England's key requirements, which is three more than any of Flintoff and Fletcher's press conferences have so far managed. Three quick clicks reveal that they need to "engineer robust partnerships", "target seamless channels" and "unleash next-generation models". Over to you Mr Ken Schofield and the ECB Review Committee. Let's see if you can better that bull, on and off the pitch.