Kevin Pietersen: is this the end for cricket’s great maverick?

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/may/17/kevin-pietersen-cricket-batsman

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The aftermath of the election is officially over. Last week, Divided Britain no longer referred to the angst-ridden outcome of the latest election, but to whether you thought Kevin Pietersen should be in the England cricket team.

Even those who would struggle to tell you who England are playing this summer – is it the Ashes again, already? – were surprised to find they suddenly had an opinion about cricket. More impressive still, Pietersen’s return to public consciousness came at a time when he had not picked up a bat for his country in 14 months; when he was plying his trade in sport’s most modest of arenas, the county championship, in front of crowds that can only kindly be described as minimalist.

English cricket has once again found it impossible to contain, to accommodate or even to comprehend the phenomenon that is Kevin Pietersen. A year ago, he was sacked by the England and Wales Cricket Board, charged with fomenting dressing room disquiet and, obliquely, with England’s poor performance against Australia. Six months ago, at the expiry of a confidentiality clause that had built tension rather than defused it, Pietersen published an autobiography that kicked sand in the faces of friend and foe alike. Everyone agreed, at this stage, that he would never play for England again.

But English cricket has a history of unfathomable decisions and bungling administrators. Two months ago, the new ECB chairman, Colin Graves, said publicly that there was a way back for the sport’s perennially prodigal son. “If he [plays county cricket] and then comes out and scores a lot of runs [the selectors] can’t ignore him,” Graves told the BBC.

On Monday, Pietersen was fulfilling those conditions, blasting his way to a triple-century for Surrey; by Tuesday, it was all in vain. The new director of cricket who blocked his way back to the team citing “massive trust issues” was his former captain Andrew Strauss, a man whose opinion of Pietersen has been well known ever since he accidentally called him a bad word while commentating on TV. (Strauss had thought he was off-air.)

Since cricket fell out of favour as a “national sport” in the 1990s – thanks to a dearth of victories and football’s pincer movement on the summer –only a handful of players have managed to transcend the game and make their mark on the wider British consciousness. At the start of the 2000s, it was Andrew Flintoff, a man with a simple enjoyment of his sport that harked back to an earlier, less clinically professional era. He was cheerful and fans could relate to him – he was the kind of guy you knew you’d enjoy a pint with. When he inspired England to their first Ashes victory in 18 years, sports lovers hugged him to their grateful chests.

Pietersen made his Test debut in the same series. His hair was long, with a mohican streak of blond, he wore a diamond earring and he batted with a freedom that hadn’t been seen in England in a generation. In an unbearably tense, closely fought series, nothing seemed to faze him. If Flintoff was a throwback, Pietersen was the very model of a 21st-century sportsman, bred for a world of buzz, hype, attention.

He was born in Pietermaritzburg, one of four brothers fiercely competitive in every area of life; Pietersen once told me that “during grace before dinner you had to keep one eye open or else someone’s going to nick your sausage”.

“Playing rugby in the back garden, playing cricket, we were so competitive it was unbelievable,” he said. “I think it’s a great asset to have. To be confident about your ability is vital… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

His Afrikaner father, Tony, instilled the discipline he needed to succeed, although arguably his mother, Penny, had the most influence over his future. It was her English birthright that allowed him, at 19, to exchange nationalities, when he felt his progress to the South African team was being impeded by the post-apartheid quota system.

Clive Rice, a former South African Test cricketer, invited him to play at Nottinghamshire. “It was a new environment for him,” says Mick Newell, the current England selector who was then a Notts coach. “There were very few people he knew. So he was certainly quiet in that environment.”

Newell first met him in 2001. He remembers a “quiet young man, fantastically athletic and talented. He’s always been a very keen, hardworking cricketer – he loves batting and he loves his fitness. But he was very different then: quiet, shy and unsure of himself. He only bloomed as an individual when he put the performances in front of his team.”

He bloomed fast and bright. Ed Smith, a former England batsman and current Test match commentator, recalls of him that, on an England A tour, “embryonic greatness poured out of him like incense. He wasn’t stressed; he was certain.” He was called up to the England team as soon as he had finished the mandatory four-year qualifying period. When he first appeared for England in his homeland, spectators cried “Traitor!”

After scoring a century, he kissed his England badge, a gesture that seemed not so much deliberately provocative as hopelessly gauche. That inability to appreciate how he was seen by others is a trait he seems never to have grown out of. From early beginnings, Pietersen made no secret of how much he enjoyed the trappings of his career – the cars, the sponsorships, the introduction to his celebrity wife, Jessica Taylor of Liberty X. Even last week, as he left the country crying injustice, he tweeted a picture of the private jet that would be flying him to Dubai.

That lack of self awareness has been at the heart of the fallings-out and forced exiles that have punctuated his career. There was the Nottinghamshire captain who threw Pietersen’s gear from the dressing room balcony; the short-lived England captaincy, which ended when he claimed he could not work with the coach; and of course Strauss, about whom he texted uncomplimentary messages to the opposition. Still, no one ever accused Pietersen of being malicious: just self-absorbed. Even Strauss admitted: “Nine-tenths of my time as England captain I found him a good guy to have in my team.”

After each incident, Pietersen would appear suitably contrite, a shade more humble. He had learned, he would say; he would do whatever was needed; he would earn back his place. He did more than that. For the best part of a decade, his individual performances were enough to outweigh the collective concern over his attitude. His batting was explosive, unpredictable, thrilling.

Since Flintoff’s retirement, his emergence from the pavilion has been the most eagerly awaited moment of any England match and inspired hyperbolic prose rarely heard of any player but WG Grace (Tom Holland, the novelist and historian, described one of his innings as “a berserker assault, the batting equivalent of dismembering a shield-wall singlehanded”).

But even that has never been enough for Pietersen, who yearns not just to be a hero, but to be loved as one. In interviews, he can contradict himself while believing, passionately, each truth he espouses. His early experiments in how to shape his own narrative – the awkwardly fascinating video, for instance, that he released in the middle of the texting scandal – have been honed on Twitter, a place where he can direct the traffic with the help of his personal policeman, Piers Morgan. His autobiography was thumping proof of both his need to justify himself in the eyes of his fanbase and a misplaced faith in honesty above policy.

Does all this make him impossible to handle? His high-profile friends – from former opponents such as Shane Warne and Graeme Smith to starry team-mates in the Indian Premier League – don’t think so. “He is slightly different in the way he thinks and the way he plays,” Kumar Sangakkara said recently. “In Sri Lanka, we’ve had players like that who are very different and there is a place for individuality and difference in a dressing room.” Or, as former England batsman Mark Butcher put it more bluntly to me last week: “You never get 11 guys in a cricket team who all like each other.”

It is, it seems, the English sensibility that has found Pietersen uniquely hard to stomach. But he wishes to play for England and he, and many others, still believe he should. Another Pietersen book is due in the autumn; whatever its contents, it’s sure to cause more ulcers.

THE PIETERSEN FILE

Born Kevin Peter Pietersen on 27 June 1980 in Natal province to an Afrikaner father and English mother. Married to Jessica Taylor, singer with pop band Liberty X. They have a son, Dylan.

Best of times Making his test debut for England in the triumphant Ashes series of 2005. He finished the series as the team’s top scorer.

Worst of times A few contenders, but probably last week when he was told that he was not in England’s plans, despite his tremendous form in the county game.

He says “Kevin, you came to England as a bowler, you played 104 Test matches, you’ve scored more runs than anyone else who’s ever played the game of cricket for England, you’ve got more man-of-the-matches for England than anyone’s ever got. Be happy, be proud.”

They say “(He’s) a great player. I played against him and he smashed me everywhere and probably would do any day of the week. Yes, we’ll all miss him, but if we worked in an office and we’d done what he’d done, we wouldn’t have a job.” Dominic Cork, former team-mate