Amusing tell-all

 KP: The
Autobiography
Kevin Pietersen
Hachette
2015, pp 324
799

The English press isn’t too fond of him because he doesn’t give a hoot about it. The England team’s dressing room is apparently too small to accommodate his big ‘ego’. The England and Wales Cricket Board finds him a ‘loner’ and his character too ‘divisive’. So, when these three forces combined — men in power, the players and the press — in a common cause, it wasn’t difficult to pen a pre-mature obituary to Kevin Pietersen’s English career following the Ashes debacle in Australia.

English cricket administration has often shown its incompetency, which has made it a laughing stock, and it’s these inadequacies that the batsman lays bare in his no-holds-barred book, KP: The Autobiography, ghosted by the brilliant David Walsh (remember his Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong?)

More than an autobiography, this is Pietersen’s side of the story to the constant negative propaganda aimed at him throughout his career. Much like his batting, Pietersen holds back no punches, and systematically, and often entertainingly, destroys many an influential figure in the English Board and the team. Perhaps the reason why he is still not welcome into the English team though the team needs him as much as he craves to play for it again.

The machinations of the ECB (holding briefs with him and regularly leaking news to the press), the control-freak that the then coach Andy Flower was, the powerful clique within the team that bullied the younger players... Many such skeletons tumble out of the closet and the ripples are still felt in the dressing room. Pietersen may no longer be around the team, but they can’t cast away the talks about him. With every setback on the field, Pietersen’s ghosts come back to haunt the team.

While the revelations are sensational, his descriptions of some of the personalities in the team are quite imaginative and original. At various stages he calls Flower ‘contagiously sour, infectiously dour’, ‘Mood Hoover’, ‘vinegar puss’, and every time he refers to Matt Prior as the ‘Big Cheese’, you can’t help a chuckle. He doesn’t either spare the likes of Alastair Cook, the yes-man of the ECB according to Pietersen, his former captain Andrew Strauss and the clique members —  Graeme Swann and Stuart Broad.

Pietersen isn’t perfect, but then who is? He has his fault lines, but he has been brave enough to admit as much and move over. How the game’s administrators in the country and the team management allowed things to come to such a pass is baffling. If the players, the coaching staff and the Board — as Pietersen points out in the book — had problems with him whistling after getting out, looking out the window during team meetings and standing aloof on the boundary line, then there is some serious problem with the system. Pietersen, as you will realise at various stages of the book, loves nothing more than batting,  and England should have harnessed that trait of his. His exchange of emails with Rahul Dravid about batting spin is fascinating as is his account of mastering arguably the most audacious stroke invented in the history of the game — the switch hit.

Pietersen’s biggest problem, if it can be said so, is he knows he is the best batsman in the side. He is supremely confident of his skills and he won’t follow any instruction without questioning its utility, and if that’s considered defiance, then too bad. MS Dhoni doesn’t go through all the training routines and so didn’t Sachin Tendulkar. Does that amount to indiscipline? Each individual is different and you need to create an atmosphere where everyone feels wanted and comfortable.

Pietersen is one of the most entertaining batsmen the world has seen and his career was cut short when he still had plenty to offer. Pietersen, it appeared, did no favours to himself by this tell-all book. Towards the end of the book, he hopes to play for England again and his aspirations appeared quite plausible when he gave up playing in IPL, a tournament he waxes with eloquence, after the ECB chairman, Colin Graves, asked him to go back to county cricket if he wanted to have any chance of playing for the Three Lions. Pietersen turned up for Surrey to reignite his English career and a triple century (355 to be precise against Leicestershire) greatly fuelled his comeback bid, but the new ECB director, Strauss, has nixed it citing trust deficiency.

It’s hard to imagine that the personal equation between Strauss and Pietersen didn’t play any role in this and that’s the most unfortunate part of this whole episode. For now, it’s a dead end for Pietersen so far as his English career is concerned, but who knows what future has in store! After all, it’s a game of glorious uncertainties.