It has been an incredibly difficult few days for the whole of England cricket which reached its lowest point on Sunday afternoon when Michael Vaughan sat in front of a packed press conference and announced he was standing down as England's Test match captain.  He was clearly emotional, but as usual he handled this last situation as he has handled more or less everything over the last five years, with great dignity and composure. 

His record speaks for itself and he will now go down in the books as England's most successful England Test captain.  Along with Duncan Fletcher at his side, the team had a spectacular crusade through 2004-05 culminating in the Ashes triumph that almost brought the country to a stand still and brought cricket not just back on to the back pages, but also the front pages of our national press. 

Michael is universally respected by not just his own players, but also those that he has played against.  His relationship with our own press core has also been an excellent one over the years with glowing tributes being written about him over the last 24 hours or so which sums up that Michael has been a fantastic leader of our national team and from this angle he will be sorely missed.  I am very confident that given a short break now he will rediscover all his energies and he will rediscover some of his best form as a batsmen and over the next two or three years will play a prominent part in England's Test match batting line up.

This weekend also saw Paul Collingwood stand down as the One Day captain and although he had not been in the job as long as Michael, I thought he was doing a pretty good job.  When these things happen a new dawn invariably arrives, that is Kevin Pietersen as captain of all three England teams and Peter Moores as Head Coach and I wish KP a long and successful stand as the nation's cricket captain.  Let's hope that in 14 months time he has brought that little urn back to England.