I THOUGHT KEVIN HAD MELLOWED... HE HASN’T!
In his other media role with Sky Sports, Nasser Hussain has made the stunning five-part series KP: Story of a Genius, charting the controversial Test career of one of England’s modern greats. Here he tells Sportsmail about the experience... EaCH summer Sky like to make a documentary relevant to their big Test series and who could be more appropriate when it comes to the ashes than a man whose 158 secured the urn on the final day of the most famous series of them all back in 2005?
The innings that made Kevin Pietersen was, undoubtedly for England fans, his most important hundred.
Occasionally we forget that people spend their hard-earned cash to go to a cricket ground and be entertained — to see things other players wouldn’t dream of doing. KP certainly did that. He put bums on seats.
It worked the other way, too, of course, as occasionally the carefree attitude would lead him into trouble with his ‘dumbslog millionaire’ moments. Sky’s email inbox a decade ago revealed it was not only his personality that polarised opinion but his cricket, too.
Being a divisive character, England did well to get 100 Test matches out of him, and let’s not forget he also did very well out of playing for England. It made him attractive to Indian Premier League franchises.
I have always held the same opinion of Kevin. He’s one of the greatest players I have ever seen. If anything, doing this documentary reinforced my opinion of that — sitting in an edit suite watching all the footage of him.
as a person, Pietersen (below) is full of charisma. If someone who had not met him went for dinner with him one evening, they would almost certainly walk away thinking, ‘I am not sure what the problem is. Isn’t he a lovely, well-mannered young man?’
But there is a huge difference between that scenario and being on tour when you spend more time with your team-mates than you do with your family.
In small doses, brilliant. On a daily basis, though, you can imagine the ego and confidence getting to other people and, as he says to me in the film, nothing was going to stand in the way of him getting what he wanted.
I wondered whether he’d mellowed over the years because he was quite damning of some England team-mates and the management in his autobiography. He hasn’t.
The one thing we could not provide the viewer with was the silver bullet — why exactly was he dropped, robbing his fans of three or four years more in an England shirt?
It would also have helped provide an even greater balance to the story if andy Flower, in particular, alastair Cook, Matt Prior, James anderson and Stuart Broad had felt able to contribute.
That they didn’t goes to show that people are still very raw about the breakdown between him and what had developed into a great England team.
Equally, there has arguably been no one like Pietersen in English cricket and the acrimonious ending should not detract from what a wonderfully gifted, before-his-time, natural player he was.
How many of the current England white-ball team are trying to play like Pietersen? Every single one of them!