You can say many things about Kevin Pietersen, but one thing you cannot say is that he is normal. In fact he is anything but.
Since he debuted for England as a 25-year-old South African in 2005 to the day he last wore an English uniform in 2014, controversy has followed the man.
And during his time in the English cricketing wilderness over the past 15 months it has done anything but abate. This past week has been no different.
Much of the talk about Pietersen has been very black and white. Either he should be running around against New Zealand on Thursday and Australia in the coming months or he should not.
This isn’t right and isn’t fair on Pietersen or the English Cricket Board. Because the fact is, this isn’t a black and white matter. There are at least 50 shades of grey that aren’t being examined (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist).
Let’s start by going back to March of this year, recently appointed chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Colin Graves was quoted as saying, “If he … comes out and scores a lot of runs then they can’t ignore him.”
The implication of this comment is clear, Kevin Pietersen has a clean slate, if he piles on the runs in county cricket and an injury happens or an incumbent is out of form, he will be among those considered for selection. That is all Pietersen ever asked for and he seemed like he was going to get it.
Let’s get this clear from the get go, Pietersen did not want an immediate recall into the side. He understood that he had to earn his position and nothing was going to be handed to him. Those saying that he should have to earn his spot in the side are 100 per cent correct and Pietersen agrees with them. He has repeatedly said that in his articles for The Daily Telegraph in the UK.
Pietersen’s hopes for a clean slate, for the ability to work his way into the English side, were dashed a week ago when new director of cricket at the ECB Andrew Strauss, who himself has a long history with Pietersen, met with Pietersen and told him that the ECB has “no plans for him to play for England this summer” and that they “couldn’t make any guarantees going forward”.
Strauss cited massive trust issues between the ECB and Pietersen. He refused to elaborate upon this. That is Strauss and the ECB’s first mistake.
I can partially understand why Strauss wouldn’t publically say who didn’t trust Pietersen. I am absolutely certain, however, that Strauss would have earned considerable amounts of respect if he had just come out and said that it was he who did not trust Pietersen and the steps that both men could take to repair those trust issues. I’m sure Pietersen would not have blasted him in his newspaper article if Strauss had done this.
Had Strauss declared that he was the man who didn’t trust Pietersen we wouldn’t be having the debate we’re having now, about who and what this so called lack of trust surrounds. Instead we would be discussing Pietersen’s path to redemption.
If Strauss was not willing to be open to the general public he should most certainly have been willing to be open to Pietersen. From what Pietersen has written in his article Strauss would not tell Pietersen who it was that did not trust him. Instead he said exactly what he has told the public, that there were deep-seated trust issues between the ECB and Pietersen. Because the ECB is a person with feelings and doesn’t like it when Kevin writes mean articles about him.
Pietersen has now been in the wilderness since the completion of last year’s Ashes disaster. People have asked what he has done since then to cause a further deterioration of his relationship with the ECB. We don’t know because Strauss won’t tell us. Seriously though, Pietersen certainly hasn’t helped himself and that started during the last Ashes series.
I attended all three days of the fifth and final Test of the Ashes series and it was clear that something was wrong. Pietersen looked more disinterested than when I go shopping with my sisters. Captain Alastair Cook repeatedly banished Pietersen to fine leg and he showed more enthusiasm in signing autographs than chasing a cricket ball. It became clear that he didn’t want to be there. And yes you can blame him for this.
Pietersen is a professional cricketer, it is his job to try his hardest when he is out there, even if his team is in the midst of an absolute train wreck of a tour. I can understand Pietersen privately being quite annoyed with how the tour panned out, being disappointed with the way he had batted – he may have been top scorer but he did not bat well – and disappointed with the way Alastair Cook and Andy Flower led the tour. That is all understandable but he should not be behaving in the manner he did on the field.
By acting completely disinterested on the field Pietersen gave the ECB an easy way out. He gave them public ammunition to use when firing him, and everyone knew it was coming, on top of all the stories that were filtering out of the English dressing room. It was clear that Flower would not be coaching for much longer.
Surely Pietersen could have come up with a more diplomatic way to take some time off. If he had played his cards right the ECB may have agreed to give him six months off, a chance to play in the IPL, and then requested he come back to play County cricket and then possibly pick him for the limited overs matches against India at the end of the English summer or the tour of Sri Lanka in November and December.
Had this been the case the most recent Australian summer and early autumn may have been very different for both parties.
But Pietersen did not do this, he inflamed the situation by not playing a day of County cricket, despite being contracted to Surrey. He inflamed the situation by releasing what some would label a defamatory autobiography. Seriously, what was he thinking? The accusations he threw at all in the English setup are breathtaking. Surely he did not expect to have a clean slate after releasing a book like that.
For many it was a point of no return. I don’t understand why he would write such a book if he ever had any intentions of returning to the English setup. But in the book he revealed he did have intentions to return.
“If I was offered the opportunity to play Test cricket again for England I would jump at the chance. I dream of playing for England again,” he wrote. It is mind-boggling.
Putting his pre-2015 behaviour behind him, Pietersen claimed to have turned over a new stone. He came out and played County cricket and had some pretty solid innings, albeit against some average bowling attacks. He then hit that magnificent 355 not out at The Oval against Leicestershire and was delivered the devastating news that he would not be considered for selection this year.
I understand why he was angry, he has a right to be angry. But surely someone would have told him that writing a newspaper column in which he accused Andrew Strauss of deliberately trying to lose the Ashes was not a good idea. He had just been told that he wasn’t being picked because he wasn’t trusted, how is a heavily critical newspaper article going to do anything to help repair those trust issues.
Instead of writing a newspaper article, last week was the perfect opportunity for Pietersen to put his head down, continue working and prove to the ECB that he was able to work hard out of the limelight, toil away and seek to build that trust. If he was contractually obliged to write a column he could easily have written about how good he felt during his innings and prevented this media campfire becoming a wildfire.
Of course, all of this could have been avoided if England had better managed the situation a year ago. They could have cited Pietersen’s age, claimed that after the Ashes disaster it was time to bring an influx of youth into the team. That Pietersen would no longer be picked for England and that then 32-year-old Matt Prior, who had been dropped during the Ashes, would be a fellow victim of this new youth policy.
There would have been an uproar but it would have smoothed over eventually as the ECB held firm. Australia did it with Simon Katich and it was not popular, but it led to the debut of David Warner and we are reaping the benefits today.
But the ECB did this, they cited trust and respect issues at every possible instance and then proceeded to string him along when a new regime took power, leading him to believe that hard work and runs could earn him a recall. The whole situation blew up yet again when they suddenly cut that string.
As a neutral observer I want to see Kevin Pietersen batting for England in the near future. As an Australian I don’t want to see it happen until after the Ashes. But I just hope he puts his head down, stops complaining and piles on the runs in County cricket. Because eventually he will have scored enough runs that Strauss and co will have no choice but to pick him.
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