It sticks in the Spin's craw to admit it, but when England and West Indies kick off their one-day encounters with back-to-back Twenty20 internationals next week, the summer might suddenly become quite interesting. If the Tests were a miserable mismatch between a good team operating at 75% and a bad one wheezing along at 50, then the one-dayers will at least have the added ingredient of the split captaincy to keep us chuntering away.
Like global warming and Gordon Brown, most people have a view on the split captaincy, even though it hasn't been a common enough phenomenon for us to draw any real conclusions. It worked for the Australians, but then they happen to be rather good players. It worked, briefly, for England when Adam Hollioake led the one-day team to victory in the Akai Singer Champions Trophy in Sharjah in December 1997, but was axed too soon after that. And it barely got going in 2003 when Nasser Hussain ended the arrangement after only one Test following Michael Vaughan's victory in the NatWest Series.
Sri Lanka did it for a bit and New Zealand are about to do it. But those with the strongest opinions tend to be the ones who are most directly affected. When Vaughan said last night, "I'm very confident it can work with me and the new captain, but if he comes in and does a magnificent job, it's the end of MV," he was not only coining a worrying new development in the Great Third-Person Debate, but airing the insecurities that engulfed Hussain four years ago.
In some respects he need not worry. Back in 2003 Vaughan had a relatively drawn-out triangular series in which to impose his own, more laissez-faire, character on the one-day team. Paul Collingwood - let's stick our neck out here - will have only two Twenty20 and three 50-over matches. Hussain was weighed down by the Zimbabwe affair and his own intensity, while Vaughan's recovery from a career-threatening knee injury has over-ridden his disappointment at another all-too-predictable failure at the World Cup. He is also, by own admission, "chilled", not to mention the most statistically successful Test captain England have ever had. The pressures are fewer.
And yet. What has the four-Test series really told us about Vaughan circa 2007 as a batsman and captain? His century at Headingley was sublime, just as his first-innings 19 at Chester-le-Street was alarmingly scratchy. In neither case was he properly tested by the West Indian bowlers, and the ineptitude of their batsmen hardly tested his tactical skills either. India should tell us more.
In the meantime, five resounding victories for Collingwood will, as Vaughan recognised, inevitably lead to speculation. Stripped of one facet of the game, Vaughan might feel like the all-rounder who has been forced by injury to operate as a batsman only. Fail to score runs, and there is nothing left to fall back on.
Vaughan is probably right. He is a relaxed enough character to cope with the situation, and Collingwood is pretty amenable himself. But one of the sportsman's favourite clichés is that you can only control the controllables. This might be one situation not even Vaughan will be able to control.
Extract taken from The Spin, Guardian Unlimited's weekly take on the world of cricket.
