THE idea that Adam Hollioake is the best man to take England’s one-day team forward won oblique, if not explicit, approval yesterday from the most influential of the four men who must decide who takes over from Nasser Hussain.

Duncan Fletcher indicated before the team’s departure from South Africa after their World Cup elimination that if Michael Vaughan and Marcus Trescothick are not yet considered ready for the job, an experienced and successful captain might be the answer.

Fletcher is not averse to splitting the Test and one-day captaincy and he is at least open to persuasion that Hollioake, at 31 not too old to lead England at the next World Cup, is the most sensible solution.

“We’ve just got to make sure that we get the right guy,” the England coach said. “There are a lot of strong candidates in the side but we also have to look at the balance of the side. You want to pick the best side and hope that the best captain is in it but sometimes you have to consider saying ‘hold on, there isn’t a strong candidate to do that and we might have to pick from outside.’ ”

For Fletcher to say that there are “several” strong candidates in the present team was pushing loyalty and tact to an extreme. Vaughan is the best of them. He is an unflappable, even-keeled character, certain of his place. He showed leadership qualities when captaining the England A team in South Africa in 1998-99. In the long run he is Hussain’s likely successor as Test captain, but he is prone to an occasional moment of daftness and his lapses in the field, inexplicable for so natural a ball-player, have become notorious.

With all the distractions that it entails on and off the field, Fletcher calls the England captaincy, when it is a full-time responsibility as it was for Hussain, the “most difficult job in world cricket”. Australia have split the leadership of the Test and one-day sides between Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting without any problems and, as Ponting is likely to assume the Test captaincy for the first time in the West Indies next month, so Vaughan might in time prove himself the right man to take over from Hussain. He is 28 but relatively inexperienced, having played in only 26 one-day internationals.

Hollioake’s intelligent captaincy has undoubtedly played a part in Surrey’s recent success. There is something of the Stuart Surridge in him and at the Champions Trophy in Sharjah in 1997 he led England to their first and only one-day tournament victory overseas since Mike Gatting’s side in Australia ten years previously. He returned to England from his family home in Perth halfway through last season after the death of his younger brother, Ben, and the birth of his daughter but he did so a subtly changed character.

His free-spirited batting in both one-day and four-day cricket convinced David Graveney, the chairman of the England selectors, that he should be restored to the England one-day team. He was duly picked as Andrew Flintoff’s replacement in Australia but did not play a game under Hussain, once a rival as well as a team-mate, and he was not chosen for the World Cup. His last appearances were made during the 1999 World Cup.

There is no rush to make a decision, with no one-day international before June. It will be made by Graveney, Fletcher, the third selector, Geoff Miller, and Dennis Amiss, the newly elected chairman of the International Teams Management Group. David Morgan, the chairman of the ECB, has a right of veto over decisions about the national captaincy but it has only been used once, in 1989, when Ossie Wheatley overruled Gatting’s reappointment after his refusal to apologise for the Shakoor Rana incident.

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