MICHAEL Vaughan will announce his retirement from playing at a press conference tomorrow after his request to pick and choose his Yorkshire involvement this season was rebuffed.
The former England captain saw the door slam shut on his international future when he was omitted from the provisional Ashes squad last week, and following a Headingley meeting with Martyn Moxon and Stewart Regan yesterday morning, his Yorkshire career is now also understood to be over.
Current Ashes squad members Andrew Flintoff, Paul Collingwood and Kevin Pietersen pay tribute to Michael Vaughan.
Vaughan expressed a desire to conclude his County Championship involvement with immediate effect, but he wanted to play in certain Pro 40 games at the back end of the season.
Instead the Yorkshire hierarchy appear to have opted for a clean break.
The decision represents a swift u-turn for Vaughan after his insistence during Yorkshire’s pre season tour of Abu Dhabi that he would not retire if he failed to make the Ashes squad.
“There are so many players who don’t come back into county cricket after retiring from international cricket, but I feel refreshed and ready for a few more years,” he said on March 17th. “I will be playing cricket next year, we will just have to wait and see where.
“If I don’t play for England again, I will be playing for Yorkshire. I love playing cricket, this is such a good life.”
Less than four months after making that statement one of English cricket’s greatest success stories will now sit and watch the very same Test series that made his name four years ago.
It has even been suggested he may take up the offer of work for Sky TV as a commentator for the coming Ashes series.
It is unfortunate for Vaughan that he didn’t get the chance to bat one last time at Headingley and his last act in professional cricket was now almost certainly watching AJ Harris bowl him for nine in the dark at Leicestershire last Friday night.
Vaughan yesterday gave his time to a flood of spectators during Yorkshire’s defeat to Derbyshire in their final Twenty20 cup game of the season at Headingley in which the hosts missed out on a place in the top flight of next season’s P20 competition by finishing fifth in the North Division.
He was not selected for the match but signed countless autographs and even refereed a football match for his teammates in their warm up.
“We said to Michael this morning that we felt it wasn’t appropriate for him to play,”
said chief executive Stewart Regan.
Vaughan sat through the heavy defeat with his son Archie on the balcony at Headingley after Regan, Moxon, skipper Anthony Mc- Grath and Vaughan agreed that his fellow players would be best served by his absence from the action.
The official retirement of one of, if not England’s greatest ever captain, is expected to be announced at an Edgbaston press conference tomorrow.
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