Tuesday was the dawn of a new era for English cricket, according to the chief executive of its ruling body. If so, the one-man hurricane that is Kevin Pietersen made it a particularly blustery one after any hope of a return to the England team was effectively ended by his former captain, citing a “massive trust issue” between the batsman, his erstwhile team-mates and the board.
At Lord’s the England and Wales Cricket Board was unveiling Andrew Strauss as its new director of cricket, a position created to address a slump in the national team’s performances in the past 18 months that included a 5-0 Ashes thumping by Australia and a World Cup campaign this year in which the seemingly impossible task of failing to make the knockout stages was achieved with aplomb.
But before Strauss, Pietersen’s former captain, could outline his vision, the 38-year-old had first to explain his reasoning behind the batsman, fresh from scoring a career-best 355 not out for his county side Surrey, continuing his exile from international cricket 15 months after his ECB contract was paid up.
While Pietersen’s talents are not in question – he sits as the country’s highest scorer across all three formats of the sport with 13,779 runs – the absence of trust from both sides, the media was told, meant the 34-year-old would continue to be overlooked.
“[Pietersen] has been phenomenal for England over a long period of time and he should be very proud of that record,” Strauss insisted. “But we’re in a position now where there’s a massive trust issue between him and the ECB. It’s very much a two-way process. I’m not apportioning any blame. It’s happened over a number of years.
“If you want to resolve a problem, first of all you have to admit there’s a problem. That’s what we’ve done today. In the short term he’s not part of our plans. No team environment can be sustained without a lack of trust. I’ve let him know he’s not part of our plans for the future, and I can’t give him any guarantees beyond that.”
The pair met on Monday night near Pietersen’s home in Berkshire, along with the ECB chief executive, Tom Harrison, in order for this message to be relayed. Curiously, Pietersen was then offered a position on an advisory board for England’s one-day side; unsurprisingly, that sweetener to the bitterest of pills was rejected.
The furore over Pietersen has torn English cricket asunder since his removal from the squad after the catastrophic Ashes defeat in early 2014. The man who sacked him then, the managing director Paul Downton, has since departed as have two England coaches in Andy Flower and, late last week, Peter Moores. The ECB’s then chief executive and chairman have since moved on and it was this sense of regime change that gave Pietersen hope his England career could be resurrected. But, then as now, the fundamental question, as to whether the sheer force of Pietersen’s talent weighed heavier than his effect on those who manage and play alongside him, remains unresolved.
That the board’s position needed to be restated was, in part, down to the words of the incoming chairman and millionaire founder of the Costcutter supermarket chain, Colin Graves, who, at the start of March, told a radio interviewer that Pietersen’s England exclusion would continue unless he forewent a contract to play in the lucrative Indian Premier League and signed to play first-class cricket for a county, where runs could force the selectors into a rethink.
Pietersen has met his end of the bargain, this week’s huge innings against Leicestershire at The Oval demonstrating that even in the autumn of his career he remains one of the most destructive players to wield the willow. But for Strauss and his new employee at the ECB, the runs-and-wickets column in the statistics-soaked sport is not the only way a player is judged. After nine-year England career, the last game of which was the Sydney Test match in January 2014, the scars of the player’s various run-ins with authority are clearly yet to heal.
While his removal as captain in 2009, due mainly to a fallout with the head coach Moores, in his first spell in charge, began the mutual distrust between Pietersen and the ECB, text messages sent to South African opponents about his captain, Strauss, three years later proved most damaging. After three months on the sidelines and a stage-managed “reintegration” into the side, troubles returned on the tour of Australia under the captaincy of Alastair Cook, leading to Pietersen’s permanent removal in February last year.
An incendiary autobiography published last October, in which team-mates, coaching staff and ECB officials were dispatched to all parts, made Pietersen’s stated aim of a return look somewhat optimistic. “When you’re talking about trust, the book doesn’t help because a lot of relationships were laid bare in it,” confirmed Harrison, the former broadcast rights executive at the media group IMG, who began his own role in January.
England’s World Cup campaign, in which they lost all four group matches against fellow Test-playing nations, resulted in Downton’s removal and the creation of the role that Strauss agreed to fill only last weekend. His first act was to remove Moores as head coach on Saturday, 13 months after he took the role for a second time and a day after the news had been broken by three national newspapers, including the Guardian, during a one-day international against Ireland.
Issues over the supine performances of the men’s team, the falling numbers in recreational participation in cricket – last year witnessed a drop of 65,000 players between the ages of 14 and 65 – the professional game’s continued seclusion behind the paywall of Sky television and the failure to capitalise of the success of Twenty20 cricket as witnessed overseas, sit top of the to-do list of Strauss, Harrison and Graves.
This new triumvirate believe that these issues can only be addressed properly by drawing a line under the Pietersen saga once and for all. And yet on Tuesday, the ECB’s failure to explain the decision beyond the issue of broken trust, and its lack of certainty on its permanence, means it will likely rumble on into the summer and beyond.
