England’s Ashes hopes still rest on colourful KP
KEVIN Pietersen is surely the most famous sporting personality to have come from Pietermaritzburg. Novelist Tom Sharpe, a former resident, described it as “half the size of a New York cemetery and twice as dead”.
Pietersen, 33, has just won his 100th test cap for England, a country for whom he qualified to play just over nine years ago by dint of an English mother and an unwavering belief that the cricketing world needed him as much as he needed it.
It has been a thrilling and unpredictable ride ever since and, to celebrate, Pietersen flew his wife, son, parents and three brothers to watch its apotheosis in the white heat of an Ashes test at the Gabba in Brisbane.
But he faces a daunting task to help save the first test as England went to stumps at 24 for two, chasing an improbable 561 runs to take a 1-0 lead in the five-test series.
England will have to create Ashes history to win the Gabba test with their previous highest winning fourth innings score at 332 for seven in Melbourne in 1928.
The world record for the highest successful run chase is the West Indies’ 418 for seven against Australia in Antigua in 2003, while the highest winning chase at the Gabba is Australia’s 236 for seven against the West Indies in 1951.
For Pietersen to reach a century of caps suggests two things: that the recipient is an exceptional cricketer of great consistency, which he is, and that he has been accepted, even loved, by teammates, selectors and supporters, something not guaranteed in Pietersen’s case.
Teams are a fragile ecosystem of vastly different personalities with a general understanding from their members that you place in- dividual aspirations behind, or at least beside, those of the common good. Players who do not buy into that credo rarely last long unless they are extremely talented, in which case a pragmatic pact of tolerance is formed.
Mostly it works, but Pietersen threatened that in the worst way last year when he undermined Andrew Strauss by abusing the captain in direct messages to members of the South African team.
One theory as to why he did it is that he was still smarting after being relieved of the England captaincy, having tried to stage a clumsy coup against Peter Moores, then the England coach, three years earlier.
Another was that he was annoyed at being unable to play a full season of the Indian Premier League, although why he should bad-mouth Strauss for that was puzzling to say the least.
Despite Pietersen’s beef, he was reintegrated after being dropped for two months. Pietersen can still shred a bowling attack and no captain can afford to ignore that.
Indeed, two of his innings last year, the 149 against South Africa at Headingley and the 186 against India on a “rank” turner in Mumbai, rank among the greatest in test history.
Many who encountered Pietersen early in his career will find it astounding that he ever changed, but there was evidence during last summer’s Ashes that he was trying to play for his team rather than the gallery.
The forces that compel him to perform on the biggest stage have not been neutered. A full house of 42 000 at the Gabba, most screaming for his blood, would cause many hearts to miss a beat but not his. For most players, such instances trigger the instinct to fight or flight, but not Pietersen, in whom the thirst for glory seems to override both.
Of the nine England players who preceded him to 100 tests only Colin Cowdrey and Alec Stewart made hundreds in their centenary test. If Pietersen gets to 20, you would not put it past him to join them. (He was dismissed for 18 in England’s first innings.)
The Australian press have tried to unnerve him by painting him as an outcast and hater of all things Australian. But he has floored them with a series of witty putdowns. If he can bat away Australia’s bowlers with similar ease, the Ashes could well be England’s by Melbourne.