Michael Vaughan: Hard to see Alastair Cook as a Test-only captain

I was staggered when I heard Alastair Cook openly admitting at his press conference after England’s defeat by Australia in Sydney on Sunday that he was struggling, that England cricket needed change, and that he had not been asked for two weeks about his position as captain.

What has changed in the past two weeks is that England have lost a one-day series. But this is a team in transition. Half the team are missing. There is no Jonathan Trott, Kevin Pietersen or James Anderson, and Graeme Swann has retired. A young and inexperienced England side with some players who are still scarred by the Ashes whitewash have come up against an Australian juggernaut and the results have been predictable.

I did not really expect anything else from this one-day series, so I was amazed to hear Alastair talking so negatively on Sunday. Remember it is only last summer that Alastair captained England to the Champions Trophy final and came close to leading us to our first global 50-over title.

He will no doubt be feeling that the pressure has been building on him for England to start winning games, with a 5-0 whitewash in the Test series now followed by defeat in the one-day series. He will feel that he needs to win some games to justify his position as captain, but I think he is taking too much blame on himself.

It has been a tough tour for Alastair and there have been very few press conferences where he has had the opportunity to say something positive. But it does worry me that he has got to the stage where he has openly admitted that he is struggling. At the end of the Test series, he did a positive press conference in which he made it clear that he was still the leader of the side and that he wanted to carry on as captain.

I would have hoped that, after Sunday’s defeat, he would have said that he still wanted to carry on as captain of both the Test and one-day sides and take this side through to the next World Cup. He did not do that and, if the rumours are true, he is now looking to give up the one-day captaincy and carry on only as Test captain.

Alastair has clearly got himself in a situation where he is questioning his position in all formats of the game. When you find yourself in that sort of place, it’s difficult to get out of it. The only time I had negative thoughts as captain, I resigned the following week in 2008. Even when we were going through tough times, I always felt that I could get us playing a better brand of cricket.

When I stepped down as one-day captain at the end of the 2007 World Cup, it was an easy decision for me to make. I was going to step down even if we won the tournament because my knee was knackered and my one-day game was not good enough for me to stay in the team. As it happened, we had a poor World Cup, but the captaincy tends to go in cycles and the World Cup is often the point at which the captaincy changes.

Alastair will now have to decide at the end of this tour whether he has still got the energy to be England captain and whether he feels that he can help to improve and develop the side. He will also have to decide how much the captaincy issue is draining his cricketing skills because England need Alastair to be scoring runs at the top of the order. If Alastair does decide that he cannot continue as one-day captain, I cannot see how he can be just a Test match captain.

At the moment England have too many leaders. When I was captain, I wanted 11 captains on the field, 11 players who were thinkers and whose advice I could rely on. But England have had too many leaders in the past two years. We have had Andrew Strauss, Cook, Stuart Broad, Ian Bell and even Eoin Morgan as captains and we now have two coaches — Andy Flower in Test cricket and Ashley Giles in one-day and Twenty20 internationals.

For absolute clarity, I think we need one captain and one coach and one voice. I was at my most powerful as England captain when I was in charge of all formats rather than having different styles of leadership for different formats. I still think that approach is the best way to get England back on track and get the team winning again.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014