MICHAEL VAUGHAN, who is nominally England captain, will hand over the job to Andrew Flintoff should his stand-in lead England to success in Australia this winter. “I am the first to admit that if we go to Australia and Freddie retains the Ashes, he should keep the job,” Vaughan said.

“I’m there in the background in case they need me as a leader. It’s not the be-all and end-all of my career to be captain. I just want to come back and play cricket again.”

This is quite some statement, albeit that it is burdened with two weighty hypotheticals. It hangs on England winning the Ashes and assumes that Vaughan will again be in a position to challenge for the captain’s role. Because, while the hype in the past fortnight has been the possibility of Vaughan executing a miracle comeback in time for the latter end of the Ashes, he has acknowledged that the other extreme cannot be ruled out — that the comeback never happens.

“If I get back on a cricket pitch, that’s quite an achievement,” Vaughan said. “There’s a small chance that I may play in an Ashes Test, there’s also a small chance I might never play again.

“I don’t think I’ve got much chance of the Ashes, to be honest. You never know, but people have got to understand that it’s a real, real long shot. I’m only looking at playing my first game in December — that’s a year out of the game, so it’s a hell of an ask to be playing an Ashes Test three weeks after that.” That is why his England colleagues are attempting to do their stuff in the ICC Champions Trophy in India and he is reduced to a PR role back home. On this occasion, Vaughan is representing the England team and their sponsor, Hugo Boss, although his text is less male-grooming and more the grooming of the man he sees as his successor.

For a start, he thinks that Flintoff is the right man to have been given the Ashes captaincy. After the all-rounder’s appointment, the pair of them set about organising a meeting. “Freddie rang up and said, ‘Would you go out for dinner?’ ” Vaughan said. “I said, ‘I’ll have lunch because, with you Freddie, I know where dinner goes.’ ”

They ended up sitting down for half an hour at Geraint Jones’s wedding last month. “It was not a case of my saying he must do this or that. He’ll do it his way,” Vaughan said. “I think he knows how good his team is going to have to be. It’s a big positive that he’s stuck his hand up and said he wants to be England captain. He could easily have said: ‘Let Straussy [Andrew Strauss] do it.’ He’s backing himself.”

What is interesting is the dynamic between long-term and temporary captain. Vaughan understands that Flintoff needs to assert himself and his style, yet at the same time Flintoff — and Strauss — consulted Vaughan during their spells as captain this year.

Furthermore, Vaughan was absent for most of the summer — he was attempting a comeback during the Sri Lanka tour and, during the Pakistan tour, “mentally I was kind of gone, I’d just been ruled out for six months, I didn’t want to watch cricket”. Yet the tentative plan for the first Ashes Test in Brisbane on November 23 is that he will be with the team in the same hotel.

“But I won’t be training with them,” he said. “I’m there to try to get fit. But I’ll be there for a chat if anyone wants a chat or if they want me to say anything.”

Will this not complicate the issue? “I can’t see me being a distraction,” he said. “I’ll make sure I won’t do anything other than help the team.”

He admitted, though, that he cannot help but think like a captain. Would he phone Flintoff if he sees something that Flintoff has not? “Of course I would,” Vaughan said. “Without a doubt. I might not be playing, but I want to make sure we beat the Aussies.”

Of prime importance here, he said, is the business of Flintoff captaining by himself. “One of his biggest challenges is how he manages his own bowling. Freddie is one of those characters who wants to do everything, but he also knows that his ankle can’t withstand it.”