Captain Cool

A tough and calm leader to stand alongside Brearley, Vaughan treated his players as grown-ups and had a cover drive to die for.

Michael Vaughan retired this week as one of the finest Test captains England has seen.

I rank him alongside Mike Brearley, because they were both charming people on the surface, but underneath they were as tough as old boots.

You have to be if you are going to deal with the egos and personalities in an international dressing room.

When I played for Brearley, he was an expert at blending a diverse group of characters into one successful unit.

We had Ian Botham, who was outrageous but hugely talented. We had David Gower, who liked to do things off the cuff.

I was a lover of practice nets, always wanting to be as thorough as possible in my preparation. Our wicketkeeper was Alan Knott, a brilliant performer with a stack of idiosyncrasies.

Brearley understood that each man needed something different if he was going to give his best in the middle. The same goes for Vaughan.

He treated people as grown-ups, and made allowances for the fact that Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff needed to be given attacking licence.

In this, he was different from Peter Moores, the England coach for his last 18 Tests in charge.

The pair were never going to gel because Moores was so dogmatic in the way he handled players.

According to the Moores method, everyone had to prepare in exactly the same way, whether that meant going to the gym, swimming in the pool, or playing football or touch rugby.

His is a schoolmasterly sort of approach, and at County level it can be successful. But when you go into an international dressing-room, you are dealing with more mature and talented people, who don't want to be treated like schoolchildren.

It is frustrating the Moores-Vaughan split became such a problem, because it stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of the way cricket teams work.

Duncan Fletcher used to say that the captain is the managing director of the side, while the coach should be a consultant.

Cricketers are on the field for 30 hours during a Test, so they had better be able to think for themselves.

When Vaughan was still coming through the ranks at Yorkshire, there were plenty of signs he would make a good leader. I always felt he had a good temperament. He was just so cool under pressure.

We saw this unflappability in the 2005 Ashes. On that critical final day at Edgbaston, when Australia came so close to winning, he never gave any sign he was worried.

Before you can control others, you have to be in control of yourself.

Even when Marcus Trescothick was appointed vice-captain, a couple of years before Nasser Hussain stood down, I still had a feeling Vaughan would become the next captain of England. When I suggested this on a radio bulletin, it caused a great deal of surprise. But some people are just natural deputies.

You have to be a different sort of personality to take the lead.

However good Vaughan was, there is a shelf-life that comes with captaincy.

It has become much more difficult over the last 15 years. You have all the PR to deal with, plus the sponsors, the meetings with match referees, and so on.

All these distractions can be mentally debilitating. Did the captaincy affect Vaughan's batting? It is hard to say.

He had one truly great series, in Australia in 2002-03, but he could never quite recapture that flair.

Ultimately, I think his mistake was to try to play the same way for the rest of his career.

Cricket is like life: it ebbs and flows, and you go through good times and bad.

The trick is to know when to eke out a gritty, ordinary half-century, and when you are in terrific form and can take on the bowlers. Vaughan should have appreciated that no one can bat at 100 miles an hour all the time.