Fast bowlers aren’t often captains. They’re more likely to get injured. They’re more likely to be tired and bad-tempered in the field. There’s always the temptation to over- or under-bowl themselves. But these things aren’t insurmountable.

Whenever a Test captaincy vacancy opens up, the discussion begins. Who are the options? Top players are required for so much international cricket these days that usually there’s no obvious standout candidate with extensive first-class captaincy experience.

So the TV pundits go through the team’s inked-in senior pros and weigh up all of their credentials. And whenever they come to a fast bowler, they pretty much just say that they don’t have a case because they’re a fast bowler.

Most of these pundits are former captains and most former captains are batters because these same discussions have already happened many times before.

James Anderson knows the rules as well as anyone.

“I think more bowlers should be captain,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. “There’s lots of arguments why it would suit to have a bowler as captain, but it’s just not the done thing is it? Captains like to look good at first slip and look like they’re making all the field-position changes and doing all the good stuff. But I’m all for it.”

A few examples

Do you know the best way to become captain if you’re a fast bowler? Trick people into thinking that you’re a batter. A decent proportion of Test bowling captains have been all-rounders.

Imran Khan is an obvious example. Imran really ramped up the batting while he was in charge, hitting five of his six Test hundreds and averaging 52.34. He also averaged 20.26 with the ball during this time, so it’s hard to argue he was weighed down by the responsibility. (Imagine if Pakistan had stuck to the ‘your captain has to be a batter’ script and never put him in charge. That is a super-weird parallel universe to try and wrap your head around.)

India had Kapil Dev as captain; South Africa had Shaun Pollock; West Indies had Daren Sammy and now have Jason Holder. England have given Ian Botham, Tony Greig and Andrew Flintoff a go.

When Ben Stokes led England in a Test in 2020, we tried to work out which England all-rounder has the worst record as captain. We concluded it was Flintoff on the basis that he basically ruined his own playing career by bowling himself for 68 overs in one Test.

We’d argue that this is one of the legitimate challenges of being a bowling captain: those times when it’s all on the line and you need a breakthrough and you want to lead from the front… and then you don’t immediately get that breakthrough and the desperately-needing-a-breakthrough situation remains unchanged. A good 25 off Flintoff’s 51 second innings overs in that match were ‘just one more over’.

There have been a few non-all-rounder Test captains too.

Bob Willis captained England. Courtney Walsh led the West Indies once they were convinced of his absolute indestructibility. Pakistan got confused by the Imran thing and gave both Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis the job in the mistaken belief that you’re supposed to have your best fast bowler as captain (although Wasim did hit three hundreds, including a double, so maybe that helped (reverse) swing it for him.)

Going into the 2021/22 Ashes, Australia decided that Pat Cummins would be their captain.

Tactician or strategist?

We have always been very bad at identifying captains. We remember thinking that Michael Vaughan’s relaxed approach would undo all of the progress England had made under Nasser Hussain’s ferocious micro-management – but turned out he was a great choice for that side.

Then we were pretty sure that Kevin Pietersen would be a better option than Andrew Strauss after that. Wrong again.

It’s worth explaining why we thought that though.

One of the best and worst cricket nicknames of all time was when Kevin Pietersen was called Dumb Slog Millionaire after getting a big IPL contract. It was brilliant because it was timely, a great play on words and it played into all the sneering and snobbishness about the shortest format and the IPL in particular. It was also terrible because it totally mischaracterised KP’s batting.

Pietersen was not a dumb batter. He was a smart, calculating batter – a proactive batter. Rather than simply ‘playing each ball on its merits,’ he approached each phase of play as a problem for which he would have to come up with a solution. His batting wasn’t necessarily about minimising risk for each and every delivery; it was about manipulating the broader situation in the hope of minimising risk for himself in the longer-term. Fielders were threats. Gaps in the field were to be exploited – often innovatively. The ‘slogs’ stick in the mind because they often seemed so rash given the immediate circumstances.

All of this amounts to tactics. This is what people tend to mean when they say someone has, “a great cricket brain.” They mean that person can evaluate batting danger and either combat or exploit that, depending on whether they’re batting themselves or in the field. Pietersen has a good cricket brain. What we saw with his England captaincy were failures in strategy and man management.

These, we’d argue, are far more important aspects of captaincy and they’re elements that can quite comfortably be undertaken by a fast bowler.

On the field

Upon taking the Australia job, Cummins said that he and his vice captain Steve Smith were going to take a collaborative approach and that on-field tactics would be one area where he’d be looking to cede control a lot of the time.

“There’s going to be times where I’m out in the middle, it’s a hot day, I’m in the middle of a spell and I need to turn to people for advice, for tactics, for experience and that’s the main reason – one of the big reasons – why I wanted Steve to be vice-captain,” he said.

“How that looks? I think it potentially could look differently to [how] you’ve seen partnerships work in the past. I think that will remain pretty fluid.

“A 22-degree day might look differently to a 40-degree day. There will be times on the field where I’ll throw to Steve and you’ll see Steve move fielders around – maybe doing bowling changes, taking a bit more of an elevated vice-captaincy role – and that’s what I really want.”

A lot of people think that setting the field is the main element of captaincy, but a lot of bowlers set their own fields anyway. Why shouldn’t a captain delegate to an even greater extent and intervene only when he thinks it necessary?

Off the field

Virat Kohli is a so-so tactician, but he has developed India’s Test team significantly since taking over from MS Dhoni.

Dhoni was a good captain too, but his approach was clearly geared towards the formats where you can win without taking wickets. In contrast, Kohli wants his Test teams to go after the opposition. If he is blessed with the bowling tools to do this, he has also consistently fielded stronger bowling attacks at the expense of the team’s batting in pursuit of his goal. This demonstrates a commitment to that way of playing in a way that merely saying ‘we want to be aggressive’ does not.

The constituent parts of Kohli’s Test sides may change – often quite considerably – but his philosophy doesn’t and he has managed to imbue this into his teams. His is a culture of fitness, self-improvement, refusal to take a backwards step and inexplicable bubbling anger at all times.

He has pushed for a will to win to supersede a fear of failure and he has done so successfully enough that the team now operates perfectly well even in his absence.

And he is absent quite a lot.

Because this is the current cricket world, isn’t it? People say that a fast bowler can’t be captain because it’s so much more likely they’ll get injured and miss games – but who doesn’t miss games in this day and age? Between injuries, paternity leave and sitting out entire tours in a bid to postpone burnout, the average all-format batter will miss plenty of matches. Someone who plays for their country in all three formats is not a ‘safe’ pick if you want your captain on the field all the time.

If you’re captain of England, India or Australia, in particular, being captain is simply too big a job for you to do on your own. If you’re not playing, you’re planning or travelling. And if you’re not planning or travelling, you’re being briefed for media appearances in which you’ll be asked a bunch of tricky questions about some political hot potato or other that’s not really anything to do with hitting a ball with a cricket bat. Or maybe it’s a photo shoot today. Or maybe – who knows – maybe you’ve got a chance to go into the nets and practise.

Something has to give. Plenty of things have to give, in fact. The only question is what those things should be. Maybe bowling changes and field settings are some of the easiest things to hand over to someone else. Maybe actually playing in the matches has become an optional aspect of Test captaincy.

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Graham Gooch’s 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990 was the first eye-wateringly big innings we can remember. The idea that one guy could score that many runs on his own in a Test match recalibrated what we thought was possible. There have only really been a handful of oversized surprises from England batsmen since then.

England batsmen have made 24 double hundreds since Gooch’s triple. None was predictable, but some were more likely than others.

Let’s talk surprises and let’s do it with reference to the Sopranos. (So maybe skip to the next subheading if you’re 20 years behind with your TV viewing.)

A lot of people get killed in The Sopranos. That doesn’t really qualify as a spoiler, but if we can now refer to something that perhaps is, the death of Richie Aprile was a bit of a shock.

It was not a surprise that Aprile was killed, because a large proportion of the second series was devoted to setting him up as a problem. His death was a surprise because of who killed him: Janice – seemingly out of nowhere. You just didn’t realise she had it in her. (It is hard to think of a better two seconds of television than Richie’s smug contempt immediately followed by the look of surprise as his chair keels over backwards.)

This is the kind of impact we’re looking for.

To bring this back to cricket, Alastair Cook, Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen double hundreds weren’t generally that surprising. Because of who they were and how they played, you knew these players were capable of such feats. Joe Root is another batsman who is so good that passing 200 doesn’t often seem newsworthy.

Now that isn’t to say that these guys couldn’t surprise you. It just means they were operating with a bit of a handicap. They had to have it large in a more unlikely context to truly take your breath away.

Okay we can start now.

These have been the eight most surprising England double hundreds since Gooch’s triple…

Nasser Hussain 207 v Australia, Edgbaston 1997

Those who have listened to the first episode of The Ridiculous Ashes – the podcast we do with Dan Liebke – will already know our feelings about this particular innings.

This was the situation: England had lost every single Ashes in the 90s, Australia had just been rolled for 118 and England were now 50-3. At this point, Nasser Hussain and Graham Thorpe put on a 288-run partnership.

What was especially remarkable about this one was that it somehow remained surprising long after it had happened. Is it possible to repeatedly feel surprised about something you know full well has actually happened? Apparently it is.

Hussain’s second-highest Test score was 155 and England batsmen didn’t make another double hundred until the next one on our list, five years later. England also continued to get thrashed in Ashes series for quite a few years afterwards.

All of this meant that every time they flashed up Hussain’s highest score in a TV graphic and highlighted the fact that it was made in an Ashes Test, we’d all have to try and come to terms with the reality of it all over again.

Even now, getting on for 25 years later, it is a hard one to wrap your head around.

Graham Thorpe 200* v New Zealand, Christchurch 2002

This Graham Thorpe innings is often overlooked because it wasn’t even close to being the most remarkable double hundred in the match.

England batted first and lost two wickets in the first over. While they ultimately recovered to 228 all out, New Zealand could only manage 147 in reply. England’s second innings then subsided to first 85-4 and then 106-5. And then Graham Thorpe hit what was at the time the third fastest Test double hundred off 231 balls.

As we’ve just said, it had been five years since an England batsman passed 200 and while Thorpe was England’s best batsman of the era, his was a reputation largely forged on gritty fifties. To give a bit more information in support of that, despite finishing his Test career with an average of 44.66, his second-highest score was only 138.

It was a really, really, highly surprising innings. People would probably talk about it a lot more if Nathan Astle hadn’t then tried to chase 550 on his own in a session.

Rob Key 221 v West Indies, Lord’s 2004

If King Cricket is anything, it’s a website that knows how to share a Rob Key picture with the world. The fact that this was an event that needed to occur was in large part due to events at Lord’s in 2004.

Key was a batsman who earned a modicum of Australian respect and a niche UK fanbase off the back of a couple of small but phlegmatic innings during the 2002/03 Ashes series. He only made one fifty in eight innings – plus what Wisden admiringly referred to as “a stout, mostly passive knock” in Perth after Nasser Hussain, Michael Vaughan and Alec Stewart had all been dismissed on the first morning – but it was the way he made those runs that won many of us over.

“He doesn’t give a shit about much and is real relaxed,” said Steve Waugh. “I like that in a bloke; it stops him getting overawed.”

In an era when England batsmen tended to default to quaking in Ashes matches, these were highly desirable characteristics. ‘If only he could make a few more runs,’ you thought to yourself.

Recalled to the side for the first Test against the Windies in 2004, Key still had only that one Test fifty to his name. We monitored the scorecard from a warehouse in North-West England, desperately hoping he’d make another.

He did. And then he turned it into a hundred. And then he turned it into a double hundred.

It was all rather satisfying.

Paul Collingwood 206 v Australia, Adelaide 2006

Like Thorpe’s, Paul Collingwood’s is a double hundred that doesn’t get talked about much – but for very different reasons. This is a shame because it was quite the moment.

One Australian newspaper had called Collingwood England’s worst-ever number four ahead of the Adelaide Test. This was not an isolated thing; it was symptomatic of sneering that extended to – in fact originated in – the UK.

There was a general sense that even though he was at that point averaging 41.77 in Test cricket, Collingwood wasn’t a proper batsman. A lot of people felt that he was actually just a rather fortunate utility cricketer who’d benefited from his willingness to carry drinks on tour.

So that was where Collingwood was. Now consider the state of the series.

Despite winning at home in 2005, England hadn’t won an Ashes in Australia since 1987. They hadn’t even competed really and after conceding a 445-run first innings deficit in the first Test, things didn’t exactly feel rosy ahead of the second.

At the end of day one, England’s worst-ever number four was on 98 not out. We stayed up to watch him make his hundred the next day and then we carried on staying up and watched him make 200. It was the first double hundred by an Englishman in Australia for 78 years.

We don’t ordinarily much care for landmarks, but there was an awful lot wrapped up in this one. The match famously didn’t pan out all that brilliantly for England in the end, but it was such a perfect moment that it almost lives in isolation.

The innings as a whole was so emphatic, and then the shot to reach 200 and the immediate reaction to it so perfect and pure, that we still feel all of the joy that we did at the time, garnished with all of that hugely misplaced optimism about what was to come.

Paul Collingwood was a cricketer you could invest in. This was one of the pay-offs.

Alastair Cook 235* v Australia, Brisbane 2010

It was 2010 and England still hadn’t won another Ashes Down Under because that previous one had ended up 5-0.

Day one of the first Test at the Gabba. Andrew Strauss was out in the first over and then Peter Siddle took a frigging hat trick. On his birthday.

England were out for 260. Australia made 481. Same old, same old. We’d seen this one before.

But then suddenly, out of nowhere, England batted… and batted… and batted.

Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook put on 188 for the first wicket, then Jonathan Trott came to the crease, and then… no further wickets fell.

The match ended with the tourists 517-1. Five hundred and seventeen for one!

Strauss’s 110 was the worst innings. Jonathan Trott finished on 135 not out, Cook on 235 not and the Earth was no longer on its axis.

Kevin Pietersen 227 v Australia, Adelaide 2010

One of the features of this list is that mostly there are quite large gaps between entries… mostly.

Kevin Pietersen’s surprising double hundred came in the very next England innings after Alastair Cook’s surprising double hundred.

As we said at the time, England tours to Australia aren’t so much cricket as visits to a lab where a range of experiments are carried out to help the visitors identify every last one of their flaws. 2010/11 was the one recent exception and Pietersen’s double was when we started to comprehend that this might prove to be the case.

The 517-1 innings was so transcendentally weird it could only have been a complete outlier; a freak event that would never be repeated. So to then see another England double hundred exactly one innings later was almost as surprising.

Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen. ‘Creatures of their time’ we called them. Flat track bullies of entirely contrasting approaches.

The match panned out like this. James Anderson knocked out Australia’s top order and then Mike Hussey and Brad Haddin hustled the home side to 245. Testing pitch maybe? England made 620-5.

Cook made 148 and Pietersen – who hadn’t reached three figures in 18 months – made 227 in that particular and memorable way in which he made big hundreds.

Then Graeme Swann took a five-for and England had an innings victory. In Australia. The first of three in that series as it turned out.

Every time England reached 300 in this series, they also reached 500.

Bonkers.

Ben Stokes 258 v South Africa, Cape Town 2016

England made 312 runs in 38.5 overs while Ben Stokes was at the crease for this innings. No matter what you’ve seen from Stokes before or since, that surely counts as a surprising event. Writing at the time, we suggested that he had actually distorted time.

Stokes started at a decent lick and then accelerated – increasingly defensive field settings failing to slow him because they were offset by a Private Hudson level of demoralisation from South Africa. Even with a good number of men on the fence, Stokes was able to move from 150 to 250 in 61 balls.

The innings was so unearthly it actually left Sky commentator Nasser Hussain sombre with admiration because his brain simply didn’t know how to react.

Asked how the England team would be feeling afterwards, Ian Botham said they would be, “literally circling the moon”.

Responding to England’s innings, Hashim Amla batted for almost 12 hours and still didn’t get within 50 runs of what Stokes had achieved in five and a half. Stokes bowled 28 overs.

Zak Crawley 267 v Pakistan, Southampton 2020

Zak Crawley went into this match with a Test average below 30 and a first-class only very marginally above it. He had made three red ball hundreds and none in Tests. He was up against a rather tidy Pakistan bowling attack.

Crawley promplty clipped his first ball for four and then made another 263 runs. He did this as England endured pace, swing, seam and wrist spin, having at one point subsided to 127-4.

The longer the innings went on, the less it felt like a surprise and the more it felt like everything Crawley had done previously was the surprise. At the time it seemed like a Westworld-esque journey inward, after which he’d realise who he really was. ‘Oh, right – turns out I’m the perfect top order batsman.’

Except it wasn’t that, because one dreamy fifty aside, it was followed by a run of complete failures, such that we’re probably now back to the double hundred being the surprise; a weird-arsed soaring peak from someone who can look for all the world like a natural, but who definitely isn’t.

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Here’s a thing. Six lads that you’ve heard of are going to play a one-on-one form of cricket called the Ultimate Kricket Challenge this Christmas and New Year. (Or at least that’s when it’s going to be broadcast on Star Sports and Disney Hotstar.)

The lads in question are Rashid Khan, Eoin Morgan, Yuvraj Singh, Chris Gayle, Kevin Pietersen and Andre Russell.

The Ultimate Kricket Challenge website does not yet reflect this, featuring as it does “Kevin Peterson” and also Shahid Afridi, who presumably decided he had other things to do.

Selfish cricket

But yes, you did read that one-on-one bit correctly. In Pietersen’s own words: “It’s one versus one. In a cage.”

In one way, this seems a good fit for KP, who is not exactly world-renowned for his ability to get on well with team-mates for prolonged periods.

In another, far more significant way, it is terrible for KP, because he is fairly shit at bowling.

Pietersen is (by one narrow and somewhat arbitrary definition) the worst Test bowler of all time. That said, he is at least in some sense a Test bowler, in that he is a man who was considered good enough to very occasionally bowl in Test cricket.

Eoin Morgan is not a Test bowler. With just two professional wickets to his name, Eoin Morgan is not really a bowler at all.

Eoin Morgan would appear to be at quite a grave disadvantage in an individual format of the game where you have to do all your batting and bowling yourself.

Here’s Morgan spinning himself a catch, seemingly oblivious to the fact the ball’s ablaze.

As The Iceman, you’d think he’d be extra concerned about that.

The Ultimate Kricket Challenge does seem to be highly flammable though. Pretty much everything in the promo video catches light.

Here’s KP throwing his bat and instantly incinerating it purely through the power of tantrum.

The ultimate challenge

The Ultimate Kricket Challenge doesn’t actually seem like all that much of a challenge to us. Surely if you’re the only bowler, the ultimate cricket challenge would be a timeless Test on the flattest of flat pitches?

That seems like a real test, but this particular ‘challenge’ merely comprises two innings of 15 balls.

As far as we can tell, runs are scored not – as the term might suggest – by running, but by hitting the ball in certain “scoring zones” offering one, two, three, four or six runs.

There’s also a 12-run “bullseye”. Sadly we couldn’t unearth any information on where exactly that is located. On the bowler’s testicles perhaps?

The somewhat confusing rules also state that five runs will be deducted for the loss of a wicket and that, “Batsman is declared out incase of a dot ball, catch, run out, bowled, hit wicket, stumped or interference.”

So if we’re reading that correctly, a dot ball cannot be a dot ball as a dot ball automatically results in the loss of five runs. Perhaps if there were such a thing as a five-run zone, you could engineer a dot ball by hitting it there before getting run out – but there isn’t one, so you can’t.

Oh wait, how do you get run out if you’re not running?

Format

In keeping with more traditional cricket tournaments, you are more likely to qualify for the Ultimate Kricket Challenge semi-finals than not because the round robin phase only reduces the competitors from six to four.

The semi-finals and final will be played on the same day and then someone who isn’t Eoin Morgan will be crowned champion.

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6 minute read

Terry’s been with the firm for 30 years, but he’s not retiring; he’s going part-time. A couple of years down the line Terry reduces his hours further and then a bit later still he says that he’s going to be available for jobs he’s already done a bit of work on but that he doesn’t want to start anything new. One day you suddenly realise that you haven’t seen Terry in a very long time.

So it is with cricketers these days. They just fade away. Other than grainy Twitter clips of him striking boundaries for the [insert city name] Sunbadgerers, we honestly can’t remember the last time we saw Kevin Pietersen play cricket. But he’s definitely retired now.

As we see it, there are two main ways you can go about covering a player’s retirement. (1) You trawl through the archives, pick out his finest innings and try and do a comprehensive career retrospective. (2) You sit down with a coffee and see what first comes into your head as being the peak moment.

The issue with taking the first approach for Kevin Pietersen is that as well as all the great innings, the task also entails wading through a whole heap of stuff about him falling out with people. We once described his feud with the ECB as being exactly like a soap opera because it never ends.

Our view of that thing is increasingly that it was a situation where fairly small stuff grew to seem like big stuff for a bunch of coaches and cricketers who had to spend morning, noon and night together. For context, in one of the more accidentally enlightening passages in his autobiography, KP said: “We are on the road for 250 days a year, we wear our England kit on most of these days … It never, ever ended.”

You don’t have to like the guy to read that sentence and sympathise a bit.

The other problem with the ‘some of his best innings’ approach is that, even cut short, Pietersen’s was a long career. It took in 104 Tests, a slightly greater number of one-day internationals and a World T20 win. You can’t really do a functional summary of something that sprawling, which leaves us with option two: you go with the moment you were most excited about and just sort of hope to hell that it speaks of some greater emotional truth that somehow crystallises his entire career.

Having made a coffee and consulted our head, the thing that we thought of as being the peak Kevin Pietersen moment was his first Test innings.

We’d guess that somewhere around 99-100 per cent of you will disagree with that. Even those of you who picked something from the same year will probably go with his “series-winning” hundred at the Oval.

History, by The Verve, is a more powerful song than Bittersweet Symphony. However, you will almost never hear History played on the radio. This is an example of a phenomenon where a band earns attention for one song only for the following one to be wrongly identified as the more significant one in the long-term simply on the basis that it sold more. Eventually the big single becomes so all-pervasive that no-one really remembers the first one because that memory is never refreshed.

You can probably think of more and better examples. All we’re saying is that the 2005 Oval Test is an example of this in sport. Plenty of people think that Pietersen’s hundred defined the series and while it was of course hugely important, the series had to a great extent already been defined by then – there had already been four-and-a-half Test matches, after all. Pietersen’s was probably the key moment that was seen by most people, but that is not the same as being the best moment.

We’ve written before about how we found that whole fifth Test a slightly maudlin experience. Pietersen’s was an autumnal knock, both literally but also in the sense that if there was still much to look forward to in terms of his own career, it was already pretty clear even at the time that the zenith in terms of memorable summers was already drawing to a close.

The first Test had a different vibe. There’d been a hell of a preamble in terms of a crazy volume of adrenal one-day cricket, but Lord’s was where the posturing ended and the important stuff began.

But let’s go even further back, because we need to provide Kevin Pietersen’s back story.

Just before his Test debut, KP had a slight reputation for being awkward, but it wasn’t really thought of as being an insurmountable problem. Andrew Strauss would not at this point have called him a cunt. His personality was really just a background thing; something almost wholly overshadowed by his batting.

Back when there were no Lions in England in 2003-04, Pietersen toured India with England A and scored four centuries. Matt Prior did reasonably well on the same tour and pretty much no-one else emerged in credit. In terms of working out who England should pick to bat in the middle order in coming years, it was a pretty successful tour.

In 2004, the full England side played one-day series in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Kevin Pietersen was from South Africa and South Africa didn’t much like him.

Five innings into his one-day international career, Pietersen had been dismissed once, for a golden duck, and was averaging 234, scoring at near-enough a run a ball. In the fifth match against South Africa, Pietersen made his second hundred – an even 100 not out off 69 balls in an England defeat. In the seventh match (different times), he made 116 out of 240 and England lost again.

Presumably they were feeling magnanimous in victory, but the South African fans who had been giving him relentless shit throughout the series were also giving him a bit of applause by this point.

Forget everything that happened afterwards for a moment: this is the character who came to the crease at Lord’s in 2005 and he did so when England had been losing the Ashes for as long as anyone could remember. They had also been losing wickets to Glenn McGrath for as long as anyone could remember.

England’s score shortly after Pietersen emerged was 21-5 and Glenn McGrath had 5-7. All notions that maybe things were different this time around had been inserted into the bin.

England lost that match, but with his first (and second) innings in Test cricket, Pietersen reached into the bin, extracted those hopes, wrapped them up in clingfilm and said: “Let’s not be hasty. I think we can make something out of these yet.”

He made just 57 runs, but those 57 runs contained a lot of information and KP did three important things.

• The first important thing that KP did was pretty much fuck-all. After 41 balls he’d scored nine runs. He faced McGrath, Jason Gillespie and Brett Lee and pretty much just ignored them. He made it look like it was possible to not subside to 21-5.
• The next important thing that KP did was he smashed Glenn McGrath for 14 runs in three balls. This was simply not a thing that happened to Glenn McGrath in any circumstances, let alone (a) against England and (b) when England had pretty much already collapsed.
• The final important thing that KP did was he hit Shane Warne for six. Warne had barely bowled by this point and also dismissed KP with his very next delivery, but given KP’s one-day record at this point, hitting Warne for six definitely implanted the idea that Warne being hit for six might happen again and if Warne being hit for six by an England player could happen again, what the hell else could happen?

Pietersen’s second innings in that match was really just him elaborating on these three points. He hit Brett Lee for six, he hit Warne for six again. He made 64 not out as England were bowled out for 180. He said to his team-mates: “It is possible to hammer these bowlers and if it’s possible to hammer them then it’s definitely possible to just sort of hang around working the ball about making steady runs.”

He also said the exact same thing to the fans, which was even more important because the people in the stands were the batteries that powered that England side. That England side redefined what England fans thought their team could do and also how people thought they would go about it.

Kevin Pietersen sent out that message early and as a bonus he also gave the impression that he might play one or two innings that would be worth watching in the future.

2 minute read

He’s got to be doing this on purpose, hasn’t he? Surely?

In truth, much of what Kevin Pietersen says in his interview with Cricinfo makes perfect sense.

The gist is that there’s much to be gained from players going out together, but they also need to take responsibility for their own actions and any impact on their performance as cricketers.

Sensible stuff really, but come on, Kev – show a bit of self-awareness.

We wrote about the art of being a team player Pietersen-style back when he was sacked. It’s not as mocking as you’re probably thinking. We saw an independently-minded man with good intentions who went about things in a godawful way.

There’s a parallel here with Ben Stokes. For all his flaws, it’s impossible to imagine KP laying into a couple of blokes in the street as Allegedly Stokes did in that white-trainered footage, but both men seem to share similar faulty logic. They apparently believe that if you begin an argument in the right then everything that follows is undertaken in the name of righteousness and therefore perfectly acceptable.

There’s a story about the Stokes altercation that he started off defending someone – maybe a couple of gay men who were being subjected to homophobic abuse. Now you can certainly accept that a person might find a way to intervene in such a situation, but in the video of Allegedly Stokes, the scuffle goes on long after that. By the end, he can be seen advancing on a fella who’s backing away with his hands up in fearful surrender.

Not okay. Today’s lesson is that a person can still do wrong things even when many will accept that they started off in the right.

Although we’re not talking about physical conflict, it’s clear that Pietersen has a similarly simplistic view of disagreements – even when he’s sober. He says that team spirit was an issue on the 2013-14 Ashes tour (on that at least, he and Andy Flower will agree). However, much of what followed was just him taking issue with the team environment to such an extent that it knackered up that team environment even more.

You probably had a point at the outset, Kev, but you lost perspective. It wasn’t The Guys in the Right Corner against The Guys in the Wrong Corner with every subsequent action of yours entirely justified.

England would have a far better cricket team if their best players understood that righteousness can only ever be borrowed not owned.

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The answer is yes.

“Supergiants” beats “Super Kings” on account of it being one word. A ‘super giant’ would simply be a giant who was very, very good, whereas a ‘Supergiant’ is a massive dude with extraordinary strength and x-ray vision who can also fly. The fact that they are rising is merely an added bonus.

Kevin Pietersen is one Supergiant who will be rising in the Maharashtrian city of Pune this IPL season. In a massively unfortunate turn of phrase, his new captain MS Dhoni said of the grey-flecked controversialist: “He, like other seniors, has an added responsibility to groom the youngsters.”

Pietersen has got away with a fair amount over the years, but not sure ‘Dhoni told me I had to’ would serve as much of a defence in a court of law.

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Like a tired bear in winter, let’s try and put this to bed for a few days. Maybe it’ll have to get up again at some point next week to go for a wee, but we’re kind of hoping that we can concentrate on the New Zealand series from now on.

As far as we can tell, this is how it’s gone…

Colin Graves told Kevin Pietersen that if he came back and played county cricket and maybe made a triple hundred, he couldn’t see why he wouldn’t get back in the team. He said this because he genuinely couldn’t see why he wouldn’t get back in the team.

Then, while Graves was in the Caribbean, he discovered that England’s captain, Alastair Cook, was adopting a ‘him or me’ position on the issue. Not mad keen on having Joe Root as Test captain just yet, the ECB opted for ‘me’ in favour of ‘him’ and tried to ham-fistedly make the best of that.

Kevin Pietersen came back, played county cricket, made a triple hundred and requested his place in the side. Andrew Strauss broke the news to him.

This is perhaps why, at the press conference the following day, Strauss said that Pietersen wouldn’t play for England ‘this summer’, while adding that he couldn’t offer guarantees beyond that. He was basically just acknowledging that there are two possible scenarios.

1. England win the Ashes, Cook stays, Pietersen remains excluded
2. They lose, Cook goes and Joe Root – who has just been named vice captain – takes over

Cook presumably feels the presence of uppity Pietersen with his inability to keep his trap shut makes captaining the side impossible. If the public comes to accept the version of events outlined above, he may come to reclassify that particular ‘impossible’ as merely ‘very, very difficult’ in comparison to what he is likely to experience should England start losing this summer.

Strauss said of Peter Moores that every game had become a referendum on whether he should continue to do the job or not. It would be like that, only a hundred times as vitriolic and a thousand times less dignified.

Here’s the real nub of the problem

The main problem, as we see it, is that some people seem to think that being England captain is a big deal; like it somehow elevates you above all other England cricketers. If Alastair Cook didn’t see captaincy as something to aspire to, he could have acknowledged that it wasn’t especially his thing at the very outset and instead busied himself with the greatly more important job of scoring Test runs. Pretty much everyone would have liked him more for it.

You’d never get this kind of thing with Pakistan. Pakistan would have had about nine different captains by now and everything would have been much less chaotic as a consequence.

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What may eventually prove to be Kevin Pietersen’s final six scoring strokes in first-class cricket were, in order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. At that point, there was nowhere left to go.

A friend of ours was referred to a heart specialist once. As he sat in the waiting room alongside lots of sad looking folk, Unbreak My Heart started playing on the radio. Point is, plenty of things that you’d roll your eyes at if they happened in a sitcom actually do happen in real life.

Witness the ECB’s public relations efforts. A script editor would rip such a story apart for being too contrived, too convenient, too obvious to pass as comedy. Kevin Pietersen is allowed to believe that if he returns to England and makes runs in the county championship, he may be considered for selection. He makes 326 not out and that night – that very same night – he is told that actually, no, he will not be considered for selection.

The news is leaked, obviously. It always is. It is leaked at the exact same moment that the ECB Twitter feed publishes a link to highlights of Pietersen’s innings. The next day, the ECB officially unveil their new director of England cricket, the man who has made the decision to continue to omit Pietersen. It is Andrew Strauss, a man who once called him a cunt on TV; a man who, for all his qualities, is considered the embodiment of the establishment by those feeling disenfranchised and alienated by that very establishment.

Strauss says that Pietersen is not going to be selected any time soon because of trust issues. He later adds that he offered him a consultancy job with the one-day side, which Pietersen declined. Apparently trust is not required for that sort of a role.

If you can, temporarily suppress your feelings about Kevin Pietersen. Find a way of pretending that you’re a dispassionate observer tasked with repairing the ECB’s tattered image. They are, after all, considered a toxic brand even by themselves.

If the notion that the ECB is a cosy old gentleman’s club, a sort of pseudo-masonic quasi-incestuous backslapping coven, then that notion had to some degree been confined to certain individuals. Whether they were truly the guilty parties or not, people like Paul Downton and Peter Moores had been infected with this cancer, but they had recently been excised. Giles Clarke is about to depart as chairman and while he will retain influence, the arrival of Colin Graves had at least felt progressive.

Now, somehow, against the odds, the cancer of negative public perception has been allowed to spread. And not just subtly and by stealth, but like something from an unusually gory B-movie. People are being eaten alive. A three-time Ashes-winning captain has become public enemy number one among a large swathe of England fans. The new coach is tainted by the new-old regime even before being sounded out about whether he might maybe like to think about possibly perhaps applying.

Rights or wrongs of the selection or non-selection of one player aside, how in the hell does an organisation find a way to shoot itself in the foot like this; a prosthetic foot it only received following an identical shooting incident just last year?

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The Kevin Pietersen saga is often described as a soap opera. This is quite accurate because the defining feature of a soap opera is that IT NEVER ENDS. Okay, Crossroads and Eldorado did, but you get what we’re saying. For the most part they just rumble on, day after day, setting up contrived storylines and having them play out.

Kevin Pietersen’s triple hundred today was neither proof nor irrelevant. It was an impassioned and noteworthy innings against the worst first-class county. He can’t help who he plays. All he can do is score a few runs. Today he did that in about as convincing a manner as possible. The second-highest score in the innings was Kumar Sangakkara’s 36.

More is needed, but on this evidence more is highly likely to arrive. What strikes us most is that Pietersen was at his most exciting early on in his career when he had it all to prove. Back then, there was real steel underpinning the carnage. If his sense of being wronged has brought that back and precipitated some sort of driven final fling, then excellent.

Very few batsmen possess the qualities required to make you think you might be about to see something you’ve never seen before. Very few batsmen play the kinds of innings you feel compelled to send text messages about. It’s not about playing outlandish shots or scoring heavily, it’s a combination of brutality and endurance, a way of manhandling a match and pointing it in a new direction.

Brian Lara explored new territory, so when he got going you couldn’t really feel confident about where things were going to end. There is something of that in Pietersen. Today a hundred wasn’t enough; and a double hundred wasn’t enough; and his highest first-class score wasn’t enough. Plenty of players have hunger, plenty of players have ability. Very few sit at the farthest extremes of the spectrum on both counts.

< 1 minute readMuch as we enjoy writing about administrative staff, what they think and what they may or may not have meant when they said something in an interview, we rather feel that the World Cup is a time for writing about actual cricket.

Colin Graves has said some things, the ECB have said some different things in faceless, Borg-like fashion and Kevin Pietersen has expressed enthusiasm, as he is wont to do. While all of this may amount to something one day, it isn’t all that meaningful right now. A whole bunch of things would have to happen in the correct sequence before there could be any impact on a cricket match and lest anyone forget, cricket is about cricket matches.

Cricket-wise, South Africa’s huge score against Ireland changes nothing in our eyes. They have a couple of exceptional batsmen, some middling ones and a long tail. We still think they’re vulnerable.

Pakistan play the UAE tonight and could, quite honestly, lose. We say this only because they appear to be even worse than England and England certainly seem in the market for a mugging; ambling about the dangerous part of town with a bulging wallet tucked precariously in a back pocket.

In the other match, Australia play Afghanistan. There shouldn’t be an upset there, but it could provide some exceptionally entertaining moments.