Winning, whining and the KP conundrum

In the weeks before Andrew Strauss was charged with reversing England’s slow slide down world cricket’s totem pole, he succinctly explained why the endless speculation about Kevin Pietersen’s possible redemption as a Test batsman needed to cease.

“Ultimately it’s very important for English cricket to move on from the Kevin Pietersen situation,” Strauss, at that stage a mere media commentator albeit one with 100 Tests caps (half of them as skipper), said on the April edition of the monthly Lord’s Podcast.

“That threatens to envelope everything at the moment and the story is becoming more of a distraction than him actually playing or not.

“It’s become that big and the ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board) and the England team’s efforts to move on from him haven’t worked so far and that’s because basically they’ve lost too many cricket matches.

“By winning it allows them to move forward.”

Eight days shy of the start of seven Test matches the ECB is staging this northern summer – the first against World Cup finalist New Zealand at Lord’s – and a cursory perusal of media headlines around the cricket world would suggest the first element of that remedial strategy remains unfulfilled.

Far from moving on beyond the Pietersen story, Strauss’s confirmation that the polarising batsman won’t be considered for any of those seven Tests due to “serious trust issues” has ensured the debate has simply kicked into a higher gear.

Former players, keen observers and the pathologically opinionated have bellowed hard on the embers, with the resultant fire fuelled by a combustible mix of invective and incredulity.

Current and former internationals Graeme Smith, Kumar Sangakkara, Shane Warne, Andrew Flintoff, Michael Vaughan and Glenn Maxwell have expressed disbelief of varying degrees, compounded by the coincidental fact of Pietersen plundering the highest first-class score of his prolific career.

Pietersen stoked it further via a withering first person account in Britain’s The Telegraph newspaper of this week’s meeting with Strauss and ECB Chief Executive Tom Harrison, labelling his treatment as “incredibly deceitful” and claiming he had been “deeply misled”, while earlier today (Wednesday) he took to his preferred form of social media to provide his own sarcastic means of moving forward.

Quick Single: Pietersen outrage at 'incredibly deceitful' Strauss

Even the 2013 Wimbledon champion Andy Murray waded in.

“Is anyone else finding this whole Kevin Pietersen thing baffling?” the Scotsman tweeted.

Unfortunately for Strauss and the four-year strategy that he has been employed to implement, the fire brigade – in the guise of Test and limited-overs success for England’s men’s team – will take its time to arrive and at present is stationary amid the billowing smoke.

If, as Strauss had earlier outlined, “winning ... allows them (the ECB) to move forward” then the Pietersen narrative will have at least another fortnight, possibly longer, in which to block out the warmth of the home summer.

And should Pietersen’s assertion that Strauss – who was appointed to the role of England’s Director of Cricket last Saturday – “has been told he does not have to win (matches) this summer” is correct it could be quite some time before the fresh winds of success blow through.

That has been raised as an issue by former England skipper Alec Stewart – reportedly one of those also in the frame for the Director’s job that Strauss won – who believes Pietersen has been “let down in the way he’s been treated” by the ECB.

While pointing out he is a strong supporter of Strauss and understands his requirement to make decisions in the long-term interest of the England team, Stewart – Director of Cricket at Surrey where Pietersen is currently playing – expressed concern if results were to be sacrificed for rebuilding.

“It sounds to me (from Pietersen’s newspaper column) like we’ve already written off this summer,” Steward told the Surrey County Cricket Club website.

“Almost (as) if results don’t matter, which I don’t think the public wanted to hear – I’m an England fan and I certainly don’t want to hear or interpret it that way.”

Stewart believes that while Pietersen was far from a certainty to walk back into England’s Test line-up, even on the back of his unbeaten 355 against struggling Leicestershire this week, England cricket might have been better served if he was kept “in the frame”, at least for the current UK summer.

"It's going to be a very tough summer and I, personally, would have said ‘right, we've got a good middle order at the minute – (Gary) Ballance, (Ian) Bell and (Joe) Root are playing exceptionally well’,” Stewart said.

“‘Kevin, you're doing what we asked you to do, which is come and play county cricket, come and score runs. If you continue to do that, should there be an injury, a loss or form or a reason to make a change, you're very much in the frame. No guarantees, but you're very much in the frame.’

"They haven't gone down that route, but I respect what Andrew (Strauss) has said and what he has done because he has to be his own man starting in this new role."

That view was echoed by another former England captain, Michael Vaughan – also reported to be in the running for the Director’s job before he ruled himself out of contention last month – who believes Pietersen is now lost to England and will ply his batting trade elsewhere, perhaps even everywhere else.

Vaughan went further than Stewart, suggesting that not only could the 34-year-old South African-born batsman have been assured he remained in the reckoning for a Test recall should one of the incumbents falter during the summer, but also his path to England’s T20 set-up could have been cleared.

Pietersen confirmed in his column that Strauss had offered him a role on an advisory panel that is looking to address England’s shortcomings in ODI cricket after their premature exit from this year’s ICC World Cup, but that the offer was summarily declined.

But Vaughan believes it’s the other short form of the game where Pietersen’s experience and expertise could have been invaluable both on and off the field, while allowing him to pursue his global T20 aspirations into the deal.

“I would have liked to have seen them (the ECB) say ‘you’re going to play T20 cricket for England’,” Vaughan told the BBC overnight.

“There’s a (T20) World Cup (in India) in 10 months’ time – a World Cup.

“Are we (England) going to arrive at another World Cup with just a load of young kids?

“Kevin could have been that kind of gel of the young players of how to play Twenty20 cricket.

“He could have gone to the Caribbean Premier League, be around the IPL, be around the Big Bash (League in Australia).

“And say to Kevin  … ‘look, you’re going to continue to play in the T20 format, up until the World Cup, and by the way, we want to pick your brains of all the new techniques, all the new methods from all the leagues and all the dressing rooms you’re involved in to help us out in one-day cricket’.

“I reckon he would have taken up that offer.”

As it stands, and from the comparably haze-free distance of 17,000km away, it would appear that both sides in this intractable feud might likely have underestimated the other.

When recently installed ECB Chairman Colin Graves seemed to open the door for a Pietersen return by saying in a radio interview last March "the first thing he's got to do if he wants to get back is play county cricket for somebody”, it seems few others genuinely felt that was a likely scenario.

But not only did Pietersen immediately turn his back on a hefty IPL contract and take up a fee-free berth with Surrey, he underscored his commitment and capacity to returning to Test competition with the highest individual score seen in county cricket for 21 years.

At the same time, however, Pietersen appears not to have fully appreciated how deeply felt were the wounds he inflicted during his difficult years in the England dressing room, the lingering damage caused by last year’s caustic autobiography and the stain left by some of his more strident supporters.

To have one of them publicly refer to incumbent England Test skipper Alastair Cook last year as a “repulsive little weasel” was as inflammatory as it was ill-judged.

And despite his recognition in today’s column that “I accepted that Alastair Cook and I need to sort a few things out but I thought we could manage that”, Pietersen seems unable to recognise that the same deep sense of hurt he feels might also be shared by some of those he has taken aim at.

So both parties now walk their separate paths, while the story that binds them remains firmly rooted to the spot.

The cleansing properties of team success that Andrew Strauss believes will ultimately clear the slate will need to be achieved without input from England’s most influential batsman of this century.