Michael Vaughan: ‘There’s me and then there’s me on Twitter’

It’s largely down to Patrick Swayze apparently. We’re not talking Dirty Dancing, though viewers of the 10th series of Strictly Come Dancing in 2012 might have their own opinions. No, Michael Vaughan claims that he learned valuable life lessons from the 1989 film Road House in which Swayze plays a bouncer in a small-town Missouri bar. “Be nice,” is Swayze’s mantra to his staff, regardless of the booze-fuelled provocation coming their way.

Vaughan’s point here is the need for an international captain to maintain a certain distance, particularly with the media. “Many times I walked into a press conference and wanted to fire into people but you’ve got to be nice,” he tells WCM. “Road House taught me a lot – try and be nice, try and be humble, but in the back of your mind you’re thinking, ‘You t***’.

“I’d say the public perception of most people is wrong – with me I think it’s completely wrong. I think that’s part and parcel of leadership, which is why Eoin Morgan is such a good leader because none of us knows who he is. If people know who you are then I think it’s tough to be a leader. You’ve got to have that little bit of myth.”

And while we’re on the subject of luck, does he ever wonder how things might have turned out for him if Glenn McGrath hadn’t trodden on that ball at Edgbaston on the morning of August 4, 2005? “The older I get the more I realise how much luck plays a part,” he says. “But I do believe that if you do the right things over a period of time then you will get your reward. From 2003 to 2005 I did enough right in terms of selection and the dynamics of the team, knowing that [Andrew] Flintoff was so important and realising that [Kevin] Pietersen, [Simon] Jones and [Steve] Harmison all needed some loving. We got our rewards in ’05 because of the work we had done in the previous two years and I think Eoin Morgan earned the right to that piece of luck in the World Cup final for everything he did right in the previous four years.”

Even in such a momentous summer for the English game, Vaughan, retired for a decade, says he gets no pangs for playing. “Over 20 years I eked out all my enjoyment of playing… but in an ideal world I’d have played for two or three more years.” That’s not to say he has committed to the commentary box forevermore. In 2015, Vaughan put himself forward, quite publicly, to replace Paul Downton as the England men’s team MD. “The job went to Andrew Strauss and I recall a senior ECB board member telling me sniffily at the time that he and his colleagues took a dim view of “people who put their CVs in the Daily Telegraph”, a reference to the content of Vaughan’s newspaper column at the time.

“I’d want to be running the team,” Vaughan says. “I’d want to be around players and people. With the Strauss position my name was mentioned but within a week I knew it wasn’t going to be me, I wasn’t interested. I met Tom [Harrison, ECB chief executive] and said it’s not for me, it’s a desk job. I’m more of a people person, I need to be among people. A lot of the businesses I’m involved with are people based. Communication, managing and making sure people know what they’re about and making sure people understand that they’ve got to work hard. Maybe in time… we’ll have to see.”

David Gower once described life in the commentary box as much the same as life in the dressing room – “It’s just the wine’s more expensive”. So in that sense it’s hard to see the attraction for Vaughan to be involved on an official basis with the England team. As a confidant of Root, he is already closer to the action than most. And he says: “I absolutely love watching the game, I love just being able to study the game without that fear of failure and fear of letting people down, the horrible feeling you get when you’ve got no runs and you’ve lost the game.”

Watch this space, because with Vaughan you never quite know what he’s going to do, say or tweet next.