A star is Vaughan

In Roget's Thesaurus, cricket appears in the same section as dancing. Sport and dance aspire to the same beautiful aimlessness - light-footed, swivel-hipped, free-spirited. But you wouldn't know it from the recent history of English batsmanship.

For a decade the dominant influence has been Graham Gooch, a batsman admirable in almost every way but not noted for twinkling toes. Gooch's method disregarded the feet in favour of shifting his weight, and that of the boulder he used for a bat. It worked for him and seeped into the technique of a couple of his opening partners, Alec Stewart and Mike Atherton, who had a spring in their heels but edited it out as the arteries hardened. Stewart and Atherton in turn opened with Marcus Trescothick,who was Gooch in a mirror: tall, strong, and stiff as a toy soldier.

Now Trescothick's partner is Michael Vaughan, who became, in 2002,both a top-class player and a one-man reversal of this trend. He pirouetted to pull respectable deliveries; he went right forward, with a high elbow and a mean look in his eye, to send the ball skimming past cover; he went back to late-cut as if in a sepia newsreel. He reminded John Woodcock of Len Hutton. Best of all, he went down the wicket to loft world-renowned spinners over mid-wicket. With his quick feet, hands and wits, he could not have been nimbler if he had been wearing white tie and tails.

Vaughan's hundreds at home came on flat pitches, against modest seam attacks, but then he did it all over again on his first Ashes tour, in cricket's hottest kitchen. Asked to name the best moment of his career, he said the Ashes - scoring his three centuries. Asked for the worst moment, he said the Ashes again - losing them 4-1. So he has balance as well as talent. He is, with all respect to the two durable gentlemen in top hats, a worthy cover star for Wisden.

Vaughan was as automatic a choice for Five Cricketers of the Year as Bradman was for Five Cricketers of the Century. So was Matthew Hayden, another who has come in from the fringe to make huge runs at high speed. There were seven strong contenders for the last three places, which went in the end to Nasser Hussain, England's most influential figure in a generation; Shaun Pollock, one of the world's top two seamers, as well as a stylish batsman (and a now ex-captain, who won 14 Tests and lost only five); and Adam Hollioake, the outstanding county captain of the past few years. The choice of Hussain and Pollock may raise eyebrows, as both led national teams to heavy defeats in Australia, but if we ruled out players who get hammered by the Australians, we wouldn't have many left.