Discarded By England, Michael Vaughan Bows Out Without Fanfare

Nearly 11 months after he resigned from the England captaincy in tears at ­Edgbaston, Michael Vaughan has abandoned efforts to resurrect his international career. He will formally announce his retirement on the same ground on Tuesday after failing to force his way into England's Ashes ­training squad.

Vaughan will retire from all first-class cricket after Yorkshire turned down his request for a prolonged county farewell in one-day cricket this summer, fearing that it could become an unwelcome distraction. The decision caused an ­aggravated exchange in the Headingley car park between Vaughan and the Yorkshire chief executive, Stewart Regan, but around the county it will be generally greeted with approval.

"Michael is centrally employed by the ECB so it would be wrong for Yorkshire to say any more at this stage," Regan said, "but he has indicated several times this season that he was thinking of calling it a day. We agreed with the ECB that we would give Michael every chance to be selected for the Ashes. When that didn't happen it opened up a lot of thought processes and he has discussed them with our director of cricket Martyn Moxon over the last week or so."

It would not have taken much for Vaughan to force his way into England's Ashes plans. The selectors were ready to be seduced by something insubstantial, a couple of silky 70s perhaps, ­recognising that Vaughan's county form has never been outstanding. In that he is not alone; if it had come down to county form David Gower, one of the most graceful England left-handers in history, would hardly have played a Test.

But Vaughan even failed to summon respectability, averaging only 19.87 in eight first-class innings and saving his three half-centuries for one-day cricket. To make matters worse, the chronic knee problems which had needed four ­operations and threatened to end his career led to him missing several sessions in the field. If he could not be certain of fielding throughout an entire championship match, how could England possibly risk picking him for an Ashes Test?

Vaughan retires at 34 and, as if age was also taking its toll, his form was woefully inconsistent. In what turned out to be his last county appearance, a Twenty20 defeat against Leicestershire at Grace Road last Friday, he was bowled by a full toss.

His departure comes in regrettable fashion. It is perhaps unwise to waste too much sympathy on someone with a keen sense of his own worth, or indeed someone with enough financial acumen to hit paint-splattered cricket balls against a blank canvas and earn considerable sums of money from the resulting pop-art. He is not about to go hungry. But if he resigned from the captaincy in ­exhaustion, he now leaves cricket for good confused and a ­little embittered.

He was omitted from Yorkshire's Twenty20 side against Derbyshire. "Plans were for Michael to play, but we decided that the hype wouldn't be in the team's best interests," said Regan.

If Vaughan did hanker for a Headingley farewell, it was scuppered because his retirement has been strongly signaled by the newspaper group that employs him as a columnist, symptomatic perhaps of how his ambitions had begun to stretch beyond the game itself. Instead, he sat on the players' balcony for a while, superfluous to requirements, occasionally joined by his son, Archie, and with his parents Graham and Dee also on the ground.

Yorkshire have privately praised Vaughan's dressing-room professionalism this season, and affirmed that he has been a positive influence, but it has been an awkward situation with his presence so obviously wedded to personal ­ambition. His proposal that he should now play some Yorkshire one-day matches until the end of the season had little obvious merit, especially when his strengths are in the longer form of the game. It seems best to make a complete break.

Vaughan won more England Tests as captain than anybody and was a shrewd and highly respected leader. He led ­England in 51 of his 82 Tests, winning 26 of them, most famously the two victories that enabled England to regain the Ashes in 2005. He made 5,719 Test runs at 41.44, but in first-class cricket averaged only 36.95. In all forms of one-day cricket, he averaged less than 30. Those statistics will now become permanent. He did England proud and he has let go with great reluctance.