The Shorter Wisden 2013 (12 page)

By now, there were rumours that Pietersen was not getting on with colleagues. This was not a complete surprise. Graeme Swann’s clunking conviction that he has a talent to amuse is not to
every taste while, on his day, Stuart Broad appears capable of out-preening Pietersen. But nothing prepared us for the sky falling in during the second half of 2012.

Again, the bare bones are familiar. Pietersen announced his retirement from one-day internationals, which instantly invoked a clause in his central contract preventing him from playing Twenty20
cricket for England too. The storm broke at the close of the Headingley Test, as Pietersen threw a titanic strop at the press conference. It was part-truculent: “I’ve gotta go home.
I’m not waiting for Strauss.” It was part-paranoid: “You’re gonna make me out to be the bad guy.” But it was mostly bathetic, gloriously so: “It’s tough
being me.” He suggested that the next Test, at Lord’s, might be his last. It was evidently designed to threaten, but came out in the manner of Miss Violet Elizabeth Bott:
“I’ll scream and scream until I’m sick!”

Then the claim that he had insulted his own captain in text messages to the South Africans tossed a gallon of petrol on to the flames. Strauss was widely acknowledged as a figure of dignity and
gravitas, the kind of individual rarely found in public life, far less in international sport. Unconvincingly, Pietersen insisted the texts were “provocative” without being derogatory,
but the uncomfortable reality had already dawned. Hence his celebrated YouTube clip, in which a disembodied voice, apparently his agent’s, fed him some gentle full tosses masquerading as
questions, and he answered with a series of wooden clichés.

He renounced his decisions. He would play whenever, and in whatever form, England requested: “I can’t wait to play in Straussy’s 100th Test match next week. These things make
me happy.” Headingley had been a mistake: “I am who I am in terms of shooting from the hip occasionally. I bat like that [self-conscious smile, reeking of rehearsal].” It was
sensationally awful.

Pietersen was dropped for Straussy’s 100th Test, with the skipper remarking that his place was “untenable”. Warne, sounding not at all like a crass Australian stereotype,
suggested the two men could have “gone down the pub and had a beer. And if they’d punched the absolute whatever out of each other to sort it out, so be it”. Strauss announced his
retirement, insisting it had absolutely nothing to do with the Pietersen affair. Before making his retirement public, he spent half a day composing personal, handwritten letters to every player. He
didn’t write to Pietersen; instead, he made do with a text message.

Pietersen was left out of the squad for the one-day matches with South Africa, as well as the World Twenty20 but, after some faintly demeaning negotiations, he was brought back for
England’s tour of India. The new captain, Alastair Cook, gritted his teeth and said: “Time hopefully will be a healer, and we will be able to move on.”

Much was made of Pietersen’s “reintegration”, and the extraordinary innings at Mumbai represented stunning evidence of how much he had to offer the England cause. An abiding
image of the celebrations which followed their series victory is of Pietersen grinning at the camera, the autographs of his team-mates scrawled across his shirtfront. The picture positively
screamed “reintegration”, and the message was convincingly conveyed.

Yet, awkwardly, some recalled his character traits, his unfortunate habit of listening only to bad advice, of taking unsound decisions, of allowing ego to overrule judgment. And they recalled
the assessment of a wise old pro. During the summer, Derek Pringle had cast a cold eye over the central character in this dubious drama and delivered a sombre verdict. “Like
Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, cricketers have three phases of their playing life,” he wrote. “At first, they play for love and experience, then, as they begin to improve, they
play for glory, before they spend their dotage chasing the money. Pietersen is a brilliant batsman, but he has entered that last phase.”

Of course, the man who became KP will dismiss such caution. He plays on because it makes him happy, because it’s important to him, because he really, truly believes he is English. The old
pros and the awkward so-and-sos, they’ll never understand. It’s tough being Kevin.

Patrick Collins, five times winner of the Sports Writer of the Year award, is chief sports writer for the
Mail on Sunday.

KEVIN PIETERSEN AND TWITTER

J
ARROD
K
IMBER

Whether Kevin Pietersen was texting in Afrikaans, saying sorry or having his genius mocked, it all seemed to end up on Twitter. This was strange, because his own tweets were not
that exciting.

He warned Roman Abramovich, Chelsea FC’s oligarch owner, not to sell Frank Lampard: “Lamps shows who the boss is today. YOU DARE, Roman!” He congratulated his old mate Yuvraj
Singh on his comeback after cancer: “@yuvsingh09 great stuff pie chucker… Be strong champ!!!! #yuvstrong”. And when Sachin Tendulkar retired from one-day cricket, he ventured the
view that Tendulkar had been a pretty good player: “Statistics NEVER lie! They tell a very true story. Well done Sachin! What an incredible ODI career #thebest”.

But give Pietersen a smartphone and a way of conversing with the world, and you could hardly expect him to stay out of trouble all the time. “Can somebody please tell me how Nick Knight
has worked his way into the commentary box for the Tests??” he fumed in May. “Ridiculous.” It felt odd for anyone to worry about Knight, who is more likely
not
to pass
judgment on anything, and take his time doing it. But then Pietersen did not always appear to have thought things through: during the Indian Premier League, he would chat on Twitter to the
league’s former commissioner Lalit Modi, who just happened to be mid-lawsuit with ECB chairman Giles Clarke – Pietersen’s boss.

Somehow it seemed appropriate that, even when he wasn’t on Twitter, he was – in a manner of speaking. The fake account @KevPietersen24 became a social-media sensation, claiming to
speak directly from his ego. Many seemed happy to suspend disbelief, and the account was followed – and commented on – by England players. At one point Pietersen himself got involved in
the fun, retweeting a doctored tweet which purported to show the US president Barack Obama suggesting a beer with the fake KP. In a strange summer no one dared rule out the possibility.

But the account began to annoy him, not least because he suspected team-mates had set it up. In fact, it had been started by a friend of Stuart Broad – and, to complicate matters, on an
evening when Broad was with his friend, Richard Bailey, aka @Bailsthebadger. Broad was tweeting pictures of Bailey too. Bailey admitted: “Yes the parody was me. It was for humour purposes
only and as soon as I realised it was upsetting people I took it down.”

Alas for Bailey – and the England dressing-room – Piers Morgan, the former editor of the
Daily Mirror
and a friend of Pietersen, would not let the matter lie. Having outed
Bailey in the first place, Morgan tweeted: “Broad can collude with parody KP account, Swann can slag KP off in a book – no action taken. Total, shameful hypocrisy.”

It was one of many tweets from Morgan defending Pietersen that must have confused his followers in America, where he hosted a chat show on CNN. Thanks to Morgan – in his own mind, at
least, which was all that mattered – and England’s desire to win in India, Pietersen returned to the fold. After the series was sealed at Nagpur, Matt Prior tweeted: “Love this!
@kevinpp24 is so reintegrated he’s walking around with all our names on his shirt!” And if it was on Twitter, who could doubt it?

THE PIETERSEN SAGA

TENDULKAR’S 100 HUNDREDS

S
IMON
B
ARNES

I would have preferred 99. I thought that was enough. But on March 16, 2012, Sachin Tendulkar reached his 100th international hundred, a century of centuries. And I think there
would have been more elegance – perhaps, paradoxically, more sense of completion – if he had stopped before he got there.

He had collected 51 centuries in Test cricket and another 49 in one-dayers, each an unprecedented figure on its own. When combined, they ask for a redefinition of such inadequate concepts as
excellence. If you look long enough at a fine Islamic rug, you will eventually find the purposed error: the deliberate imperfection which shows that the humble artist had no thoughts of beating God
at his own game; a humility concealing the arrogant thought that, without such a flaw, people might genuinely have mistaken the artist’s work for God’s.

A flaw humanises and, by doing so, reminds us that something great has been performed by someone just like us: a person who bleeds when pricked, sleeps in a bed at night, eats, digests and
defecates. “Cricket is my religion, and Sachin is its God,” as the Indian cliché goes. The fact is that Tendulkar was born as we were and will die as we will ourselves.
It’s harder for humans to do things in real life than it is for a god in a story. Shouldn’t we celebrate Tendulkar for his humanity, for what he achieved, despite the inevitable
fallibility of humankind?