Is it possible that despite their best efforts both Josh de Caires and Archie Vaughan will end up carbon copies of their respective fathers?

3 minute read

Both Mike Atherton’s son, Josh de Caires, and Michael Vaughan’s son, Archie Vaughan, have thus far billed themselves as all-rounders. You’re supposed to write that they’re their own men, making their own unique ways in the game, but we can’t help but notice that de Caires is opening the batting as captain for the PCC Select XI against Zimbabwe this week. Is it possible that despite all the emphasis on how different they are from their famous fathers, they’ll in fact end up pretty much exactly the same as them?

Obviously they aren’t going to have the same careers, because the world has moved on. If you dropped 21-year-old Mike Atherton into county cricket now, he’d have a very different career to the one that played out from the late-80s onwards.

That’s interesting in itself. With so many variables in play, keeping one thing the same would tell us more about all the other parts of the game.

De Caires and Vaughan of course aren’t ‘the same’ as their dads, but it does feel to us there’s a gravity here, drawing them towards similar lands. There’s much to be gained from fighting that in these early stages, marking themselves out as distinct as a means of deflecting unhelpful yardsticks, but later on we can easily envisage those battles being abandoned.

When we first reported on de Caires in 2023, he was batting at nine and taking 8-106. Amid various comments that season about working hard on his bowling and seeing where it took him, he also said: “If I’m being honest with myself, I’m still predominantly a batter.”

Similarly, in a recent Cricinfo article about how he was happy to be ‘own man’ at Somerset, Vaughan says that while he is currently making equally weighted investments in his batting and bowling, the latter is behind because he only took it up more recently. “In terms of length of time, I’m a few years back on my bowling than I am on my batting.”

We don’t intend to put this forward as a prediction, but we wouldn’t be at all surprised if the crutch of bowling didn’t trend towards irrelevance for both players in the coming years.

What especially sticks in the mind is an observation of Mike Atherton’s that his son leans on his bat at the non-striker’s end the exact same way that he did. Obviously Athers didn’t teach him that and it clearly isn’t something de Caires will have consciously worked to mimic. Instead, it’s the product a whole host of factors, both natural and nurtural, most of which will be unconscious.

If de Caires and Vaughan want to be completely distinct, this is what they’re up against. But really they’re not striving for that anyway – because let’s face it, there are far worse England batters to draw inspiration from than Michaels Atherton and Vaughan.

The two men will grow up to be different cricketers than their fathers, but it’ll probably be that particular brand of different where everyone really harps on about really quite trivial details precisely because the wider backdrop is so undeniably samey.

Sometimes people lose sight of how small a world is. The most sophisticated Rob Schneider film is still a derivative, lowbrow crime against cinema. The sweetest death metal track is still death metal. We look forward to hearing all the many ways in which two right-handed top order batters are so very, very different from two other right-handed top order batters in years to come.

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