Kevin Pietersen is the Nigel Farage of cricket. How many runs/votes do you need for a seat in the national team? The difference is that Farage can stage a comeback in 24 hours. Pietersen has fallen to the antique gods of cricket. His latest performance, 326 for Surrey against Leicestershire, may prove him a master batsman. But cricket’s old-timers prefer to quote the motto on the wall at Lords, that cricket is not about winning “but how you play the game.”
In 2012 Pietersen split with then captain and now England cricket director, Andrew Strauss, after making singularly rude remarks about him, followed by an ill-advised book. Had he been a boxer, a tennis player or a footballer it would have had to blow over. Individual talent is talent. But cricket – in truth a highly individual sport – is said to be about “the dressing room”. It is, as de Tocqueville said of English politics, essentially about a club.
On that basis Pietersen was ejected. When he sought atonement, “desperate” for a return, he was told to stop globe-trotting for money, return to county cricket and, above all, show he could score runs. He did all these, with as climax yesterday’s sensational score. Yet Strauss has told him it was not enough. A new and clearly insoluble condition was even leaked, that Pietersen at 35 was too old.
This is clearly one of the great players of his age, able to fill any cricket ground and rekindle enthusiasm for the ailing sport. Many such talents are given to outsized egos. Pietersen’s behaviour towards his team mates was by all accounts intolerable. But he seems to have matured and mended his ways. Either way, dealing with such characters is the art of sports management. The great batsman, WG Grace, was still drawing crowds at 66. When once bowled out first ball he refused to go, telling the bowler “they have come to see me bat, not you bowl”.
England’s cricket fans crave a run-scorer as soccer fans crave a goal-scorer. They must feel that not only Pietersen has been shabbily treated by cricket’s bosses, so have they. And if his only remaining crime is his age, he ought to sue.
