England go backwards to move forwards

Michael Vaughan is back to lead England in the one-day series © Getty Images

Suddenly there was an aura about the room. The sunken, sullen silences that had marked Andrew Flintoff's final dalliances with the media on this trip were replaced by a ramrod straight back and a willingness to engage. Michael Vaughan has many talents as a leader, but foremost among these is his ability to look any man in the eye - be it a team-mate, opponent, or irritating media man with a tendency to ask the same questions over and over again.

Vaughan was all smiles on his first day back in the job, as well he might be after returning from the brink of retirement. Six months ago, he was told by a man he preferred not to name that he'd never play cricket again, and he added that he felt a "better and more rounded person" for the hardships that he has had to endure. He's had to pick himself up and start his entire career from scratch, and so perhaps he'll be well placed to bring some perspective to a dressing-room that has merely lost a cricket series.

It didn't take long for Vaughan to achieve his first PR triumph - he uttered that hardest word of all. "The team are sorry things haven't gone to plan," he said, which genuinely came as something of a relief. After Flintoff's defiant insistence that he couldn't have asked anything more of his players, and Duncan Fletcher's poker-faced refusal to accept the tour had been a disaster, it was reassuring to hear a senior squad member talking in such contrite terms.

The impression Vaughan gave was of a fresh start - and after a winter of low(ish)-profile practice and conditioning in Perth, he certainly looked more fresh-faced than any of Flintoff's Ashes veterans. And yet, it would be wrong to be suckered by the spin of the situation. He is 32 - significantly older than the bulk of the players who will now come under his command. By the 2009 Ashes - the logical target for this wounded generation of players to be reaching their peak - he will be coming up for 35, with the knees of a 90-year-old.

Vaughan's reappointment has been made on a wing and a prayer, because the England management have realised, privately, that giving Flintoff the captaincy was a dead-end decision. To get themselves out of this mess, they've had to reverse right back where they came from, just as the selectors did with Mike Brearley when Ian Botham was similarly weighed down in 1981. That particular appointment was, of course, the ultimate triumph for short-termism, but given that the ECB are in the process of compiling a blueprint for world domination by 2011, you'd have thought they'd want some rather more solid foundations than this.

The realities of Vaughan's appointment are stark. There is no alternative as captain. Or, to be precise, there is no alternative that won't batter the already bruised ego of the most talismanic England cricketer of his generation. "We've made some mistakes, but appointing Andrew Flintoff as captain wasn't one of them," announced David Graveney, England's chairman of selectors, despite five very sizeable dollops of evidence to the contrary. England are treading on egg-shells where Flintoff is concerned.

And as for any contingency plans for next week's one-day series - well, dream on if you thought that a new year would bring a new strategy. Last week, Vaughan was dismissed by a 74-year-old in one of his comeback matches. Though he was rightly laughing about it today, that fact does highlight the massive gap between the level of cricket he has been playing since he embarked on his comeback, and the level he's about to be thrust into. Most injury-prone cricketers of his age tend to retire from one-day cricket, precisely because the workload is so intense.

"We've never appointed a vice-captain in any situation," added Graveney, seemingly oblivious to the danger that a knee that has buckled three times in eight months might just find the stresses and strains of the one-day circus a bit much to cope with. "If we had to consider a situation where Michael has to leave the field or misses a game for any reason - and we are not expecting that, we are expecting Michael to play in all eight games - we'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

Ad-hoc planning has been the story of England's winter. A new year has brought a new/old captain and a new positive, talkative outlook, but the appointment has still raised more questions than answers.