Cricinfo - Blogs - Different Strokes

That this would happen was unknowable in advance: batsmen take captaincy in different ways, as Vaughan and his predecessors and contemporaries show. It adversely affected Vaughan, as it did Rahul Dravid, but had no discernible effect on the batting of Mike Atherton or Ricky Ponting while propelling Graham Gooch and Mahela Jayawardene to performances at your favourite level of the upper atmosphere. Ever the contrarian, Nasser Hussain began by finding captaincy a burden but went on to perform above his average level.

Giving up a burdensome captaincy can work wonders. Paul Collingwood recovered his batting form within 24 hours of deciding to resign as ODI captain. But since he quickly found that he was not much good at being captain and began to dislike it not much later, giving it up was clearly liberating.

Vaughan, though, was a brilliant captain in his dream job. The feeling that he would have to give it up grew over months and when the end came it was heartbreaking. Being driven to resignation like that cannot be far different from seeing a parent slip into terminal illness or realising that your marriage is on an inevitable course to shipwreck. He is bound to need considerable time to recover his equilibrium.

Awarding Vaughan a central contract but leaving him out of the squad to tour India is thus a signal that the selectors believe that he will be able to bat at a level somewhere near his old standards once he has recovered his mental fitness, although rehab for the soul will take quite some time.

There being nothing I enjoy more in cricket than seeing Michael Vaughan score Test centuries, I fervently hope they are right.

A lot of the press reaction, though, has implied that they are either nuts or ridiculously sentimental. Since I can weep at the end of “The Return of the King”, I’ll plead guilty to sentimentality, but I will also pose a question.

If it had emerged that a player had been batting in considerable pain and had had surgery to remove the problem, but that it would take three months’ rehab and he would therefore miss the tour of India, it seems unlikely that anyone would bat an eyelid at the award of a 12-month contract. Why is it different when the pain has been in his mind rather than his right shoulder?

Yes...with the captaincy and then the later injuries, Vaughan's batting was brought back from sureal to more mortal levels.
However a Test average of more than 40 is still respectable particularly when other successful England captains such as Mike Brearley and Mike Gatting only managed test averages of 23 and 35 respectively.
Plenty of great batsman (eg Lara, Tendulkar etc) have made succesful batting comebacks after relinquishing the captaincy.
At just 33yrs, Vaughan still has time to do this should his body allow and he really want to do it.
One suspects that he would dearly like to be part of the line-up to take on Australia next year...a country against which he has had so much success.

I would be interested to see whether there would be any consideration given to Vaughan moving back to the top of the order. I was often surprised that this was never mentioned when he was struggling, as his average is much better when opening.
I have always thought that Vaughan had to bat wherever nobody else wanted to, especially when we had no proper no. 3 (not that we do now by the way).
As a general comment, I doubt there will ever be a Summer of cricket (for England fans like me who came to love the game in the mid-1980s) like 2005, and I will always remember Vaughan fondly for his instrumental part in bringing that about.