A year in the sun - Michael Vaughan

These days a celebrity sportsman's CV is not complete without an early autobiography. England's football captain - his name escapes me - is on his third and his cricketing counterpart has nurdled one off the mark at the age of 28 with an account that focuses on his 2002 run-fest.

The standards of the genre are lower than the bounce at Trent Bridge: getting the book on the shelves as fast as possible is the name of the publishing game. This is no exception, as spelling mistakes and a hasty one-sentence postscript announcing Vaughan's promotion to the Test captaincy betray.

But it is not a bad effort. Vaughan has plainly talked to his ghost, Martin Hardy, more than some - Brian Lara in the creation of Beating the Field: My Own Story (1995) for example - and he addresses the major talking points of his big year frankly and cogently, giving worthwhile thoughts on team-mates and opponents. There is also a first airing to his opinions on the shortcomings of English cricket.

But given Nasser Hussain's unexpected resignation, Vaughan's take on his predecessor makes the most interesting reading. To suggest that they are not close would be false but it is clear Vaughan does not entirely endorse Hussain's leadership style. As he says at one point, "Nasser and I have our differences."

He variously describes Hussain's habit of shaking his head and kicking the dirt when somebody drops a clanger as "antics" and "histrionics". He adds, "that is the way Nasser is and we have to come to accept it as a team," the implication being that the team had not yet quite attained acceptance.

One topic on which it is impossible to place a cigarette-paper between the two men is the Zimbabwe row: both believe the England team were royally shafted by the World Cup organisers.

In a chapter that was reportedly trimmed because the publishers did not want too much on such a heavyweight subject, Vaughan said Malcolm Speed, the ICC chief executive whom Hussain verbally harangued, "came to see us totally underbriefed and failed to address any of the security issues that were raised. The ICC continued to send out the most unhelpful of mixed messages ... As for Ali Bacher, we never had a sight of him."