The Hindu : Sport / Cricket : Vaughan returns for second Test

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, May 31, 2004

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Sport - Cricket

Vaughan returns for second Test

By Ted Corbett

LONDON, MAY 30. England will be a weaker team without Nasser Hussain, said the chairman of selectors David Graveney as he announced the squad for the second Test against New Zealand at Headingley beginning on Thursday.

"We cannot replace him immediately, but you will remember that when Michael Atherton, around whom we had built the side, left we thought the same and along came Michael Vaughan and made three centuries in Australia."

Hussain announced his retirement from all cricket 72 hours after making a century and the winning hit in the first Test at Lord's.

Graveney added that as captain Vaughan, now recovered from the knee injury that kept him out of the first Test, would decide that new batting order. "The selectors have made their views known but it is down to Vaughan as captain with the coach Duncan Fletcher to decide the batting order," Graveney declared. There have been suggestions that Marcus Trescothick and Andrew Strauss should open and that Vaughan ought to bat at No. 4 where he began his Test career. It would give him more time to arrange his thoughts if he had been in the field all day and it would break up the line Trescothick, Strauss, Mark Butcher and Graham Thorpe who all bat left-handed.

It is unlikely that England will leave out Strauss so soon after his century in the first innings and 83 in the second but England may field only four bowlers and seven batsmen — with Andrew Flintoff at No. 7 and the new wicket-keeper Geraint Jones at No. 8 — leaving no room for the left-arm spinner Ashley Giles on a pitch which traditionally favours seamers. Vaughan has a run-out with Yorkshire in a one-day game at Essex on Monday but is certain to be fit for the Test.

The team is chosen as sporting Britain is still reeling from the retirement of Hussain. Graveney said it was proper that a player of Hussain's stature should have the right to choose his own moment to quit. "If you wanted a scrap, someone to stand toe to toe with the opposition, Hussain was your man," he said. "He has brought a level of passion to our game which was perhaps missing in the past. You hope a player of his stature will have a stage to leave rather than being at the whim of the selectors and he has had his stage."

Strangely, since he has had plenty to say in the past, Hussain is silent this week-end and the newspaper which has carried his words in the past has switched its allegiance to sign Strauss who, according to Atherton writing in the same paper has the composure to captain England.

Atherton and Hussain are the same age and played together for Combined Universities and the England Under-19 side before meeting again in

Tests. Atherton says that Hussain is a complex man driven by his relationship with Joe, his father, a first class player in Madras before the family emigrated to England when Nasser was five. "Once Joe gave his blessing, retirement was a formality," says Atherton "Joe has been Nasser's coach, confidant and mentor from the moment he first gripped a cricket ball in Madras, instilling in him the desperate desire to succeed that is peculiar to every immigrant population the world over."

He claims that when Nasser scored a hundred and took nine wickets for Forest School against Westminster it was Joe who criticised him to not getting the tenth. "It was the kind of memory that Nasser took to the crease with him for the next 20 years. The Hussain family story — Nasser's brothers and sister don't do too badly either — is the classic immigrant success story," Atherton concludes.

The squad: Michael Vaughan (Yorkshire- captain), Marcus Trescothick (Somerset), Andrew Strauss (Middlesex), Mark Butcher (Surrey), Graham Thorpe (Surrey), Paul Collingwood (Durham), Andrew Flintoff (Lancashire), Geraint Jones (Kent), Ashley Giles (Warwickshire), Simon Jones (Glamorgan), Matthew Hoggard (Yorkshire), Steve Harmison (Durham), James Anderson (Lancashire).

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