The hero who’s proved English modesty can conquer the world

AS A young man growing up during the Cold War, I faced the prospect of nuclear annihilation with equanimity. Yet the fortunes of the England cricket team would cause my mood to swing: from elation when we did well, to deep gloom when we lost. And against Australia, there was a lot of the latter.

Today, as a man in his 50s, I am no better. I am meant to be someone who cares deeply about politics, but I confess that the result of general elections still bothers me less than winning the Ashes.

Pathetic, I know: but then most men are still schoolboys at heart.

So this superannuated schoolboy is in a state of near ecstasy following the England team’s comprehensive dismantling of the Australians’ final resistance on Saturday — thus regaining the Ashes that had been abjectly surrendered Down Under little more than 18 months ago.

Yet there is something that really matters in what has been achieved by the England team under its captain Alastair Cook — and not just in the sense that all competitive sport can be seen as a metaphor for life’s struggles. For Cook is a standard-bearer for an idea of England — and of Englishmen — that has been ridiculed, if not forgotten.

Nemesis

This was set out in a recent magazine piece by Cook, published under the title What I’ve Learnt. With characteristic modesty, he wrote: ‘I never thought I would be a professional cricketer … I never thought in a million years I would play cricket for England, let alone captain England.’

He spoke warmly about his five years as a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral School: ‘As a chorister, I learned from a pretty early age about the discipline of working hard.’ He wrote about his work helping his wife at her family’s farm: ‘I was out yesterday morning loading sheep, and I love it.’

But one of his ‘life lessons’ struck home particularly: ‘Life is about talking to the person next to you. I don’t live my life based on the opinion of the social media.’

Cook is too nice a person to criticise another man publicly, but I wondered if he had anyone in mind. For there is no cricketer alive about whom that remark applies more than Kevin Pietersen. The exiled batsman, who has been using the social media assiduously in his futile campaign to return to the England side, had threatened to become Cook’s nemesis. In his autobiography last year, Pietersen mockingly compared Cook to the absurdly naïve figure of Ned Flanders in The Simpsons.

And as if that were not clear enough, Pietersen subsequently devoted his newspaper column to questioning Cook’s capability as a captain of the national team. Admittedly, he was entitled to do this. Not so his disgustingly disloyal trashing of the then England Captain Andrew Strauss in phone-texts to the South African team — during a match in which he was playing for England against his former countrymen.

The point is that unlike Cook, for whom pride in his country is absolutely central to his motivation as a cricketer at the highest international level, Pietersen saw playing for England as purely about his own personal career. Indeed, the reason why he abandoned his homeland was that the positive discrimination shown to black cricketers in Mandela’s South Africa was an obstacle to his promotion to the national side.

True, Pietersen later had his shoulders covered with tattoos of the ‘three lions’ emblem of the England cricket team. But this was, of course, for show.

Pietersen’s inner feelings were exposed in a passage from In The Firing Line: Diary Of A Season, a 2011 book by the Australian cricketer Ed Cowan. Cowan described a lunchtime encounter during a match they were both playing in:

‘Pietersen, in his high-pitched mixed accent, asked “What the f*** is this?” as he cast his eyes over the lunch buffet. I mentioned that it was bread and butter pudding and, being English, he should surely know what it was. “I am not f***ing English, Eddie,” he joked. “I am South African. I just work here!”’

Ha, ha. But, as we all know, jokes are what we use to tell the truth when it’s risky to express it more directly.

Pietersen does have some legitimate complaints about the way the English cricket establishment treated him. It was stupid of the England and Wales Cricket Board chairman Colin Graves earlier this year to indicate that if Pietersen scored enough runs in county cricket, he would be considered for selection for England.

It would have been more honest to tell him there and then that he had played his last game for the country — and let him maximise his earnings as a gun for hire in the Indian Premier League. It is also true that Pietersen had been a batsman of genius, as he would be the first to acknowledge. But at 35, he is well past his brilliant best — and everyone except him knows it.

Thus, when England lost the second Test to Australia at Lord’s last month, Pietersen once again took to social media to declare sarcastically on Twitter: ‘Batting as well as ever and the team have huge issues with top order! What a waste, just lying on a beach! I wish I could help!’

Leadership

In case the public did not get the message, this was accompanied by an ‘emoji’ of a flexed bicep, and another Tweet, a minute later, saying only: ‘So, so, so, so silly!’

Now, in the wake of England’s two subsequent crushing victories over the Aussies at Edgbaston and Trent Bridge, it is Pietersen — and his online mob of followers who had screamed for his recall and the sacking of Cook — left looking ‘so, so, so, so silly’.

By contrast, the man he ridiculed as a reallife Ned Flanders has shown great powers of leadership in taking a young side to victory against a hitherto all- conquering Australian team — something which not a single pundit had predicted.

And what was the first thing that Cook did after the final ball from Durham’s Mark Wood had bowled the last Australian out and the immediate celebration was over? He went to the stumps and picked one out to hand to that young man playing in his first Ashes series, to keep as a memory.

It was characteristic of Cook that he was thinking of someone else even at the moment of his own greatest triumph.

It is why so many of us England cricket fans venerate Alastair Cook and are delighted to see the back of Kevin Pietersen: bombast, bling, three lions tattoos and all.