'I like to see players being themselves and if they're not I'll tell them'

Michael Vaughan at the end of the series win in South Africa © Getty Images

Michael Vaughan was discovered playing with his mates on the outfield during a break in a Championship match at Abbeydale Park, Sheffield. The Yorkshire coach Doug Padgett nearly dropped his cup of tea in the excitement. Confronted with this sort of discovery, Archimedes yelled: "Eureka." In Yorkshire it was a by 'ecky thump moment. The high elbow, the languid movement: here was something.

It was, as it turned out happily for the coach and everybody else, the real thing. Vaughan has already travelled further than Padgett or anyone could have imagined: star batsman, briefly No. 1 in the world, and now statistically the most successful of all 29 men who have captained England in 10 Tests or more. The latter claim would also be upheld spiritually if all goes right this summer.

But the journey has not been so paved with glory that he has forgotten where it started. Remembering may help to keep him sane. "Of course, it changes your life," he says. "When you first get into it you just get on with it. It's probably only now that I've been doing it for two years that I realise how big it is. You get recognised wherever you go. This tour has been massive and the amount of faxes and messages I've had ... But I guess I can only tell you when I get home how much it's changed.

"Sheffield's fine because they know me in Sheffield for being a Silverdale School pupil and the place is quite a village anyway. We all know each other. The people who speak to me there now are the ones who've spoken to me all my life."

Vaughan was talking in an enclosed hotel garden in Bloemfontein during the one-day series against South Africa. A week earlier England had secured their first Test series victory in South Africa for 40 years, their fifth win in seven rubbers under Vaughan.

The campaign has been the toughest of Vaughan's career. It was showing in his face on this searingly hot morning and it can only have been good practice for what is to come this summer at home against Australia. A couple of his players, including the new star Kevin Pietersen, were sprawled by the pool 20 yards away. The sun was glinting off the water and it was a serene little scene, as tranquil as it can have been round his team for weeks.

He had not had much time to reflect on the Tests because he was in the middle of a one-day series that was starting to sap his last drop of energy. The 10am whiskers and the dark sacks under his eyes both spoke of a draining crusade. Like all captains he denies that the job affects his personal contribution but for the first three Tests he and the team were both engaged in a desperate search for proper form. But now for the first time he was daring to think out loud of the Ashes, as though it had not exercised him before. He still somehow looked relaxed and urbane, always more Cary Grant than John Wayne, but he did not seek to conceal the nature of his job.

"I still have moments where I get very stressed with the job. There are times when I sit in my room and worry. Of course, everyone worries but what I'm quite good at is that I can wake upthe next morning and forget about it, tackle it afresh. I always sleep well. The only time I don't is when I've batted a lot that day and you end up going through your innings till three in the morning."

Vaughan has taken the job home with him until it hurts: "Sitting down, trying to think of things where we can improve." Time - not to mention his daughter Tallulah, born during the Headingley Test last year - has probably taught him to appreciate that there is cricket and there is life.

During the fourth Test against South Africa at the Wanderers, three days before England's great victory, Vaughan had mildly (and correctly) rebuked the umpires for their inconsistent interpretation of the bad light regulations. He found himself on a code of conduct charge, was fined his whole match fee and days later heard that the match referee Clive Lloyd had accused him of being "rude and dismissive" at the hearing.

"I didn't think I was saying anything untoward," he said. "I was just trying to be honest but I said the wrong things and I got done. I guess if I was at home then it might have been different for me. But I'm not going to say anything about it now. The fine has been paid."

The job, by definition, becomes an obsession but Cary Grant is still winning by a mile in Vaughan's approach. England have won under him for many reasons: preparation, a strong team coming together at the right time, star individuals, weak and sometimes fragmented opposition, belief. They have had fun, Vaughan insists.

"New players coming in have always been made to feel very welcome," he says. "We ask them their opinions to get them involved. I felt for them in the days before central contracts, no consistency, always playing for the next game. Unfortunately it had a detrimental effect on English cricket for a long while. It probably produced attitudes that were self-driven, not team-driven.

"Graham Thorpe came up to me after the Wanderers Test and said that playing for England now is incredible because all people think about is winning the game and not about who's getting the runs or wickets. At the Wanderers he got 0 and 1 and said he'd never felt so happy, whereas he reckons once if he'd done that and England had won, he'd have gone back and sulked for five hours. That was a hugely positive comment for me."

It says something for Thorpe's progress too, of course, but it is testimony to the sort of leadership that Vaughan has deliberately nurtured. Not long after Padgett spotted him at Abbeydale, people were telling him he would be England captain one day. It is the sort of thing that well-wishers say to small boys of singular talent in the neighbourhood and Vaughan did not believe them. "I just thought they were being nice."

He never thought about it at all until shortly after his vintage series against Australia, when he scored three hundreds of increasing splendour. Then it became clear that Nasser Hussain's tenure was coming to an end.

"Marcus Trescothick was the clear favourite then but at the end of Australia I thought I wasn't going to take my name out of the equation," he says. "I was excited about seeing if I could, one, cope and, two, make a difference to the team. It's what I said when they rang, that I could improve them. I might have been lying then. But I did think there was a little mental thing. I'd always thought playing for England was tough but there was a negative tension and I wanted to bring a positive tension."

Nifty footwork at the Wanderers © Getty Images

He is also aware of the wider responsibility, something that Hussain and many predecessors certainly recognised but would never specify. "We try to practise intensely, we work our knackers off. I don't see this as the fifth most important job in the country as some people say, no job involving sport can be, it's not life or death. I always believe an NHS nurse has got a far tougher job than I've got. I can make decisions that win or lose us games but they're only games. But we understand the position we're in, that we can make people happy and change the atmosphere of the country when we do well. I'm aware we must have made a lot of people's lives that bit better in the last year or so." Vaughan is a good bloke but an implacable opponent. He is his own man and, if comparisons are called for, he has some of Mike Atherton's obstinacy and plenty of Hussain's drive, but sprinkled with cheeky humour. The even-tempered, loose-limbed demeanour is deceptive. He confronted the Australians by using the old sporting ploy of getting his retaliation in first. They could hardly believe it and were aghast at the treatment being meted out in return as though they should be pitied.

For instance, as Glenn McGrath has conceded, Vaughan regularly told him where he stood. Justin Langer, also not slow in proclaiming an opinion on or off the field, was shocked when Vaughan issued an abrupt verbal volley after a disputed catch at Adelaide. Some of the South Africans thought they detected a change in his personality, thinking that the Vaughan who first toured the country five years ago was the sort of chap who might have invited them home for Sunday tea and a read of the scriptures.

Nor will he be diverted from his course by media opinion. It has occurred to him that the immense influence of papers and television could drive the team into a certain way of playing, just as a timely article in the printed press has won a cap or two for county journeymen. Well, Vaughan is not for turning. The team will play how he wants it, not how Ian Botham wants it.

He mentioned Botham by name, not because he particularly disagrees with some of Botham's more madcap ideas but because he knows the great man still has the ear of the English public more than any other of the former players. What he suggested the pundits could do was more or less what he told McGrath, Langer and their pals. "I'll do what's best for the team."

Of course, what he means is that he and the coach Duncan Fletcher will do what is best for the team. "The captain and coach relationship is crucial," he says. "You have to be so close, bouncing ideas off each other. You don't always agree but, as soon as you go into the team, you have to be singing from the same hymn sheet, even if one of you thinks differently. He's very clever to work with, brilliant technically, and he makes my job so much easier.

"He sits with his Oakley glasses on in a game and his expression doesn't change. That's the way it's always been. Apart from golf days we don't really see much of him. He goes out with his management team for dinner now and again. On this tour he would probably admit that he has been more stressed than he has before, probably because it has been so intense."

Fletcher would admit to no such thing, not unless he was subject to some elaborate form of water torture, but Vaughan's touching on the subject echoed an opinion that had reverberated round South Africa. The England coach was prickly and he was prickly to people he had known for years in the country where he has his home.

Maybe it was more to do with a close series. Maybe it was connected to the fact that, if this series was so close, how the hell would England cope with Australia? Ah, Australia. For Vaughan and Fletcher now all roads lead to the Ashes. The captain was making no rash predictions.

"It's a summer I'm looking forward to because we're playing against the best team there has ever been. I shall certainly tell my team that, if they can't go into that with the same sense of excitement, they shouldn't be there. There's certainly only one team under maximum pressure and that's them. "We will have to play at our maximum against them to win, far better than we have on this tour. But what excites me is that I'm going in to an Ashes series with a young team, one that will be around in 2006-07, whereas they openly admit they will lose some players, maybe as many as four or five. What we have done this winter is show character and you need that and guts above all against the Aussies."

From that it might be assumed that Vaughan and Fletcher have given up on 2005. Not so. But they have to dampen everybody's ardour because Australia really are that good. Vaughan had probably also been persuaded to resist talk of impending English victory because of the form of his strike bowler Steve Harmison.

Facing the media at Potchefstroom © Cricinfo

Throughout the South Africa tour the Ashington speed king was off the pace. He bowled too short and was dealing with batsmen who played him more intelligently. Not once did Vaughan show his displeasure as Hussain might have done as another 90mph projectile whizzed hopelessly down the leg side.

Vaughan likened Harmison's loss of form to the batsman whose runs have dried up and then keeps being on the receiving end of dodgy lbw verdicts and flying, one-handed catches. "Maybe he bowled a yard too short but he was getting players out with those deliveries last year. I wouldn't even consider not having him in the team."

This is a captain who has almost certainly surprised himself. There are already mutterings that England have not had much to beat but the point is that they have beaten them as they have beaten nobody before. The wins have made him popular but he has a way with his players too. He knows when to speak to them individually and they know he knows.

He dismisses the question of his own form as captain by insisting that he is certain he will always make runs. But captains before him have suffered and, ever so slightly, he deludes himself with the before and after figures.

There is no hint of aloofness. He likes players who take the rise out of him. It is one of the aspects that clearly endears him to Ian Bell but, if Bell did it without also having a huge work ethic, it would be different. Kevin Pietersen had yet to engage the captain similarly. "He'll change. I like to see players being themselves and, if I don't think they're being themselves, I'll tell them."

As he got up to leave, he shouted some insulting banter at Pietersen down by the pool, recognising that the big, brash lad was still not quite at home. This is Vaughan's team, Vaughan's time.