Gloomy Tour Has Silver Lining for Vaughan England may have been humbled 4-1 in the Ashes Series, but for ISM’s Michael Vaughan the story was one of continuing success. The Yorkshire opener not only ended the Sydney Test with man-of-the-match honours, but was also voted player of the series. It may have been an honour previously unheard of for a player from a team so comprehensively beaten, but even the vast majority of Australians agreed with the decision that elevated the 28-year-old to a new level. The Daily Mail’s Ian Wooldridge, doyen of British sports writers was moved to make this testimony to Vaughan’s skills. If this mostly ill-fated expedition to Australia has yielded anything of genuine significance, it is Vaughan’s emergence as a batsman of such genuine class that it is now conceivable to rank him alongside Peter May, Colin Cowdrey and Ted Dexter as one of England’s greatest post-War batsmen. It was Vaughan’s seventh hundred in his last 12 Tests that put England in command in Sydney. The 183 second innings runs took his aggregate to 633 just 24 short of Geoff Boycott’s record for an England batsman on an Ashes tour and when Boycott set the mark on the 1970-71 tour there were six Tests. Despite ducks in the first and last Tests, Vaughan averaged a remarkable 63.3 and hit three centuries in all. by Martin Hardy on behalf of ISM