Vaughan returns to a changed world

The world has changed just a little bit since Michael Vaughan last took charge of England's Test team. The Ashes he fought so hard to recover have been relinquished, humiliatingly. The band of brothers with whom he surged to an English-record six series wins in a row have been routed and scattered. The knees on which he used to play some of the most sumptuous cover-drives in the game have been weakened and stiffened by hours of surgery. It's just as well he's making his comeback on his home ground at Headingley. (Or Headingley Carnegie, as it wasn't known when he played he last played a Test there in 2004.)

"It does feel like a fresh start and like being at the beginning again," said Vaughan, whose long-awaited comeback had to be postponed by yet another Test (his 16th on the sidelines) when he broke his right middle finger during his solitary first-class match of the season, for Yorkshire against Hampshire at the Rose Bowl. After an indifferent World Cup, in which he found form just as the team was preparing to fly home after the Super Eights, he is returning to the side on reputation rather than merit.

"Are you going to start calling me Jose?" he joked, in reference to Chelsea's Jose Mourinho, the self-styled "Special One". But it is a serious point. On the day that the Schofield Report, English cricket's inquest into the failings of the winter, was unveiled, Vaughan's uncontested return to the helm of the team felt more like a throwback to English selections of the 1950s. The Australians are the best in the world precisely because they have no truck with such issues of sentiment.

Who knows what England would have done had Andrew Flintoff not failed his fitness test ahead of this game. To accommodate both the captain and the team's talisman, the selectors would have had to dispense with either Ian Bell or Paul Collingwood - who have been two of the most reliable batsmen of the post-2005 era. "I know I need some runs and I am pretty confident I can get a few," said Vaughan. "You are always under pressure playing international cricket. That is what I live for and why I want to play this week."

"I am England captain, I have made myself available for selection and I've been selected," he added. "Surely that is a positive thing? I want to play cricket. Yes, in a wonderful world I would have liked to have had a four-day game behind me, but that is not the case. What I do have is a lot of fond memories and a lot to draw back on. If I can re-live my net form in the middle, I am sure I can get a few runs this week."

He could hardly wish to face a more amenable attack than the current West Indian line-up, however. For all the confidence that Ramnaresh Sarwan and his colleagues took from the Lord's draw, the fact remains that five of England's top seven thumped centuries in the course of that match, although in mitigation, the bowlers had come into the game without so much as an over of first-class practice, thanks to England's fickle spring weather.

"A couple of our bowlers looked very shy," said Sarwan - a notion that would make a few greats of the Caribbean turn in their graves. "But one positive we can take from the last game is that we bowled quite a few short balls in the second innings. In the first innings, we were very hesitant about it."

Ryan Sidebottom: worth a gamble on his former stomping ground © Getty Images

West Indies enter the match, however, in high spirits after the defiance of their Lord's performance. Chris Gayle and Daren Ganga ensured theirs was the last laugh to echo around an empty ground on that soggy final day, when they added 89 unbeaten runs for the first wicket. "One of the things we will try to do is stay on top of their main bowlers," Sarwan said, in anticipation of a nervy opening gambit from Steve Harmison in particular. "We saw when Australia played them [in the Ashes] they were very positive against Harmison and kind of threw him off. We have a similar sort of approach.

England will at least have an extra bowler to call upon for this game, after Matthew Hoggard's injury effectively reduced them to a three-prong strike force. James Anderson would be the favourite for a recall, after featuring in the fifth Test at Sydney as well as the World Cup, although there must surely be a temptation to give the one-cap wonder, Ryan Sidebottom, a chance to atone for his wicketless debut against Pakistan in 2001, on a ground that he knows intimately from his seven-year spell with Yorkshire.

"We've given them all the opportunities to bowl in the nets and it will be a tough decision to make," Vaughan said. "They both look to be bowling pretty well. The left-armer is a different option, someone we haven't seen for a while, who provides different angles. He has always got his wickets at a decent average, his economy is very good, he bowls in good areas and swings the ball nicely, so you could say he has been unlucky to only get one cap."

The key member of the seam attack, however, will be Harmison - one of only four surviving colleagues from Vaughan's last victory as England's Test captain, at Trent Bridge in 2005. Marcus Trescothick, Ashley Giles, Simon Jones and his namesake Geraint cannot expect to play international cricket ever again; Andrew Flintoff and Matthew Hoggard could miss the rest of this series. Maybe there does exist some telepathic connection between captain and strike bowler that will once again unleash the beast. But England shouldn't bank on it. They did exactly that when Flintoff was named as Harmison's captain last winter.

"We have just been trying to get our minds into the right frame going into tomorrow's game," said Vaughan. "Sometimes you can try too hard and I felt he did that at Lord's and just got away from himself. He has to relax and bowl, we all know he can do it, I am just looking forward to seeing him at his best here." Maybe, with all eyes focused on the man at mid-off, rather than the man in the delivery stride, he can do just that.

England (probable) 1 Andrew Strauss, 2 Alastair Cook, 3 Michael Vaughan (capt), 4 Kevin Pietersen, 5 Paul Collingwood, 6 Ian Bell, 7 Matt Prior (wk), 8 Liam Plunkett, 9 Ryan Sidebottom, 10 Steve Harmison, 11 Monty Panesar.

West Indies (probable) 1 Chris Gayle, 2 Daren Ganga, 3 Devon Smith, 4 Ramnaresh Sarwan (capt), 5 Shivnarine Chanderpaul, 6 Runako Morton, 7 Dwayne Bravo, 8 Denesh Ramdin (wk), 9 Daren Powell, 10 Jerome Taylor, 11 Corey Collymore.