Towering ego that toppled the man who made cricket sexy
As England’s greatest batsman is banished amid an almighty row
Kevin Pietersen is hard to ignore. For a start, he is 6ft 4in and Hollywood- handsome. He has covered his athletic cricketer’s torso and biceps with a gallery of vast, self- celebrating tattoos which he shares with his two-and-a-half-million followers on the instagram picture- sharing website.
His often eye-popping thoughts are read by a similar number of devotees on twitter, the social media network on which his beautiful pop star wife is also a loyal presence.
they are known, inevitably, as cricket’s Posh and Becks, not least because he now enjoys a profile that goes far beyond sport.
though he is very much still playing the game, the south African-born Pietersen, who is an MBe, has already put his name to two best-selling autobiographies.
thanks to a series of commercial endorsements, he is reckoned to be england’s wealthiest cricketer by some distance.
He drives a Ferrari — like the £150,000-aweek Premiership footballers he often resembles with his outré haircuts and loud style — even though the average wage in county cricket is only £50,000 a year.
One of his more self-indulgent acts was to have a large tattoo of a map of the world, showing every cricket ground where he scored a century for england.
Of course, there are reasons for this excessive attention and the considerable rewards he has amassed. Pietersen has scored more runs for england across all formats of the game than any batsman in history; not only that, he has done so by playing with a visceral, crowd-thrilling flamboyance.
You don’t need to know your googly from your bouncer to recognise his innate brilliance.
On Monday and yesterday, Pietersen, 34, was at his destructive best at the wicket. Playing for surrey at the Oval, he flayed the Leicestershire attack in a manner so brutal that if it had been a boxing contest, the referee would have stopped the fight.
smashing more than 50 boundaries, including 15 sixes, he scored 355 not out, the highest innings of his career.
What timing, you might think. For just hours later, he was due to have a crucial meeting with the new head of english cricket, at which he would be told whether he would ever again play for england.
For highly controversial reasons, which we shall come to, he has not played for the national team for more than a year.
if statistics were all, there was an irresistible argument for his return. england, whose recent test record is patchy to say the least, are playing the Australians in a home Ashes test series this summer.
MANY fans of the game believe that an in-form Pietersen — a member of four Ashes-winning england sides — would be a godsend. except, as became clear yesterday, he won’t be given the chance. Beloved of the spectators Pietersen may be, but cricket is a team game, too. And in a crowded dressing room, the presence of an individualist with an ego the size of a planet has frequently proved to be something of a wrecking ball.
A man who has suffered the fallout from this more than most is Pietersen’s former england test captain Andrew strauss, about whom — unforgivably, you might think — the batsman sent insulting texts to their south African opponents during the 2012 test series.
strauss is the man who has just become director of england cricket — and it was he who told Pietersen during their 40-minute meeting this week that he will never again be tolerated in the national side.
Given what has gone before between the two men, perhaps we should not be surprised.
in 2013, thinking that a tv commentary microphone was switched off (it wasn’t), strauss inadvertently told the world that he thought england’s star batsman was ‘ an absolute c***’.
strauss’s views presumably were not altered much last year by Pietersen’s second autobiography, titled KP, in which he characterised a number of his england team-mates as bullies, halfwits and martinets.
Pietersen’s continued exclusion caused a twitter storm yesterday. Gary Lineker tweeted in protest: ‘i see Mr strauss has allowed personal grievance to influence his decisions. seems extraordinarily petty and immature.’
Many other fans shared that view. But among the opinion of men who matter in england cricket, Pietersen is beyond the pale — and he has only himself to blame.
suffice it to say, you don’t need to be a sports fan to be gripped by this extraordinary story of a vainglorious man who finds himself set against a conservative establishment who seem determined to close ranks against him.
Pietersen has long been an outsider. He was born to an english mother in south Africa’s natal Province and made his first-class debut there in 1997 before moving to england.
in 2007 he married Liberty X singer Jessica taylor, with whom he has a son.
On the field, he continued to pile on the runs. But while there was a brief, unsuccessful, spell as england captain, there were other more serious question marks about his approach to the game.
Pietersen, it was said, often seemed to be playing for himself, or playing up to the Pietersen legend. He would go for risky shots when the team needed him to be cautious.
After yet another entertainingly reckless slog had led to his dismissal, his invariable response was a shrug and the dismissive mantra: ‘that’s the way i play.’
this did not endear him to team-mates. nor did his aloofness and apparent reluctance to take advice.
One former colleague recalled Pietersen’s attitude as being: ‘if you can play, i’ll respect you. if you can’t, i won’t.’
Opponents had noticed, too. those masters of sledging, the Australians, gave him the nickname ‘FiGJAM’. it stood for: ‘F*** i’m Good — Just Ask Me.’
OTHERS made fun of his perceived vanity on his beloved social media. A spoof twitter account called ‘ KP genius’ attracted 14,000 followers with tweets such as: ‘the world hasn’t experienced genius like KP’s ... since an apple fell on isaac newton’s head.’
While Pietersen’s ego was huge, it was as fragile as a lightbulb and the spoof twitter account caused him to burst into tears in front of the england coach.
But he was also his own worst enemy. During the 2009 West indies tour, he asked to go home between tests because his wife had stayed home to appear on the tv reality show Dancing On ice. in early summer 2012, he asked leave to fly to india between tests to take part in the lucrative indian league, the iPL.
the end-game began in the late summer of 2012 with the so-called ‘textgate’.
Pietersen sent messages from the england dressing room to their then opponents, in which he used derogatory south African slang about his own captain, strauss.
‘this was one of his most catastrophic errors,’ according to simon Wilde, author of the book On Pietersen, which examines his peculiar psyche.
After the texts were leaked, Pietersen was dropped, and in his first match back for his county, he was booed out to the wicket and jeered back to the pavilion after a first-ball duck.
But england needed his genius. After strauss stepped down as
captain, to be replaced by Alastair Cook, Pietersen was recalled.
But the dressing-room tensions would not go away. At the end of the last disastrous Ashes tour, a ‘disengaged’ and ‘disconnected’ Pietersen was effectively sacked by England.
In a press statement which was not unlike those released after the break-up of a celebrity marriage in which one of the partners has been caught cheating, the England hierarchy declared:
‘The England team needs to rebuild after the whitewash in Australia. To do that we must invest in our captain Alastair Cook and we must support him in creating a culture in which we can all be confident he will have the full support of all players, with everyone pulling in the same direction and able to trust each other. It is for those reasons that we have decided to move on without Kevin Pietersen.’
SIMON Wilde wrote: ‘Pietersen had not committed an unforgiveable act. It was, rather, an accumulation of small things amounting to one overwhelming conclusion... trust between the parties was gone.’ Pietersen had to go. One of the England backroom staff recalls: ‘ His apologists said that he has been mismanaged by the England set-up.
‘I think he has been managed brilliantly. With his attitude and without their patience and good management, he wouldn’t have lasted more than a season or two with England, let alone ten years.’
But he would not go quietly. Last October, his incendiary book KP was published. It was both vengeful and self-absorbed (the word ‘I’ was used 18 times in the first 180 words).
‘The dressing room had been awful for years,’ Pietersen reported. ‘ There were wins and star players, but the dressing room was sick all along.’
Then he named those he felt were responsible.
Among a clique of ‘bullies’ were the current Test stars James Anderson and Stuart Broad — ‘not the sharpest tool in the box’ — and the wicketkeeper Matt Prior, whom Pietersen described as a ‘ Big Cheese’ who was merely ‘a Dairylea triangle thinking he’s Brie’.
Meanwhile, former coach Andy Flower was ‘dreadful’. All giants of the game, all damned. Cricket reeled. Cook, who remains the England captain, said that Pietersen had tarnished a great era for England cricket with his claims. It is hard to argue with that.
This week, Kevin Pietersen let his batting do the talking. But it now seems indisputable that there is no way this arrogant maverick will represent his adopted country again. For some, that is a tragedy. For others, the conclusion of this extraordinary human drama is simply natural justice.