How Michael Vaughan left most cricket fans pining for his England days

I keep a photograph by my desk of England’s victory lap of the Oval after the last day of the 2005 Ashes. The friend who took it was drunk, so the outfield lists like the deck of a ship. It was shot on one of those disposable plastic cameras, but you can still pick out the players making their way around the boundary.

There’s Andrew Flintoff, one arm above his head, Marcus Trescothick, holding the little crystal replica of the urn, Steve Harmison, one hand throttling a bottle of champagne, and Michael Vaughan, dapper despite his tired whites. He has an England flag knotted around his neck. It hangs down his back like a cape.

It was taken at about a quarter-to-seven in the evening on 12 September, half an hour or so after the umpires had called off play on the final day of one of the greatest Test series, when England had beaten one of the best teams to play the game to win back the Ashes after 16 years.

They say cricket doesn’t build character, but reveals it. But you wonder how many of the millions who watched that series really had anything like a clear idea of the personalities of the men playing in it.

Fans are romantics, after all, and make heroes of their favourite players. In the years afterwards, we would get to know a little more about them all. Trescothick and Flintoff, who had seemed to be such easy and convivial people, opened up about their struggles with mental illness. We had Vaughan all wrong, too. There were no great revelations, rather a gradual unfolding of himself in his television and radio work, and on social media.

Still, over time the gap between the Vaughan we saw in 2005 and the one we have come to know in the years since came to seem an awful lot wider than the 100-odd yards between the