Cricket: 'this is a Great Opportunity to Take Our Game to the Next Level With Self-belief'

Paul Collingwood set his own positive agenda as England's new one-day captain yesterday by pronouncing that the cautious "back-to-basics" approach adopted by his predecessor, Michael Vaughan, in the World Cup would be abandoned for a more aggressive outlook.

Collingwood and Vaughan are good friends and natural allies, and see no friction in their parallel tasks to lead England to success at one-day and Test level. But even Collingwood's celebratory media conference at The Riverside yesterday became a reminder that differences in approach will be forever scrutinized. They will both need to be streetwise and trusting to survive it.

For the health of English cricket, it is paramount that Collingwood's one-day role is not somehow seen as subservient to Vaughan's Test match leadership, an unspoken second-in-command, still young enough to scurry around energetically in the limited-overs game while Vaughan does the cerebral stuff. One-day cricket is persistently undervalued in England, so such an interpretation will be tempting.

It did not go unnoticed that while Vaughan was given input into Collingwood's first one-day squad - David Graveney, the chairman of selectors, confirmed as much this week - the new captain was content to make do with a quick nod of approval when he was told of those selected. Little things like that must naturally change.

Collingwood's task yesterday was to assert his own individuality, to talk optimistically of enterprise and aggression, as new captains do, without necessarily suggesting that the World Cup strategy under Vaughan and the former coach, Duncan Fletcher, had been entirely misconceived. He just about managed it. You could have barely inserted a fag paper between them, but it would have been harsh, especially nine days before a public smoking ban.

"We have played our best one-day cricket when we have been aggressive and taken the match to the opposition, and had plenty of self-belief, and hopefully we can instil that in all the players," he said. "We haven't been a great one-day side for some time now, so it is a great opportunity to take our game to the next level. I will be allowing the players to express themselves, because that's when you play your best cricket."

The World Cup, contended Collingwood, had been an understandable response at the time. "You have to play to your strengths at a particular time and I am sure we will do that in the future. The pitches in the World Cup were obviously doing a little bit. We tried to approach it in a basic way. It didn't work, but hopefully in the future under similar conditions we will go out with a real positive attitude."

Collingwood has yet to finalize with coach Peter Moores where he will bat - "I might bat high up or I might be more of a finisher" - or even where he will field, his specialist position at backward point not being the easiest place to make captaincy assessments.

But he views the split captaincy with confidence. "The Test captaincy is obviously a completely separate thing. Michael will go about that in his own way and I will go about the one-day captaincy in my own way. We will give advice to each other but we want to develop the sides as best we can in our own individual styles.

"Michael is a close friend and we will support each other 100% and want each other to do well in each job. It won't be a problem. It has worked for Australia in the past. We are both heading in the same direction. We want as good an England team as we can possibly get."