pietersen/atherton

Last updated at 6:12PM, October 6 2014
The truth. One man’s battle against the English cricketing establishment and the bullying clique and destructive management that ran and ruined the England team. That is the prism through which Kevin Pietersen and David Walsh, his ghostwriter, would like us to see the world this week. But interpretations of truth are altogether more complex, no matter the right of anyone to put his side of the story if he feels wronged.
Two “truths” — absolute and inescapable — should be remembered, as attempts are made to chart the tricky waters of claim and counter-claim in Pietersen’s brilliantly written autobiography. First, Pietersen was one of the finest batsmen to have pulled on an England shirt in the modern game. Instinctive and innovative, he was a match-winner who entertained the crowds and was feared by the opposition as all too few England batsmen have been in recent times. A great player.
Second, Pietersen was part of an England team who, for a brief period around 2010 to 2012, were among the most successful ever produced by this country, winning the World Twenty20, the Ashes home and away and becoming the No 1-ranked Test team in the world. That ruthless, disciplined, hugely successful team was coached and managed by Andy Flower — Moriarty to Pietersen’s Sherlock Holmes in this narrative — and led by Andrew Strauss, of whose success as captain Pietersen openly admits he was jealous.
The two truths are linked to some degree. Great players make great teams and the Pietersen effect was a chilling one for opposition bowlers that helped Flower and Strauss produce a team who dominated for a short period of time. But only to some degree: to denigrate utterly one of the finest, if not the finest, professional coach England have had, to dismiss Flower as a control freak and irrelevant to England’s success is not a truth, but a warped view of events seen through the rear-view mirror.
Having been lucky enough to have watched Pietersen’s international career in its entirety, from its brilliant beginnings in southern Africa in 2004, to its sad ending in Sydney ten years later, there have been many press conferences and interviews in which Pietersen’s view of the world, and his place in it, have changed. Flower gets full bore in the book and the teams who Strauss and Alastair Cook have led are portrayed as completely dysfunctional throughout, even during winning times, but it was not always so.
Take this quote from Pietersen, for example, in September 2011 about Flower: “As a coach he’s amazing because he listens so much and makes everyone feel welcome in the dressing room. Everyone has an opinion. I think that is incredible. I really think he’s a fantastic coach.” In the book, Flower is nailed thoroughly, portrayed as a useless coach and a miserable man. A “mood hoover”, a “micromanager” who sweats over the small stuff and, at one point, “f***ing horrendous”.
Just before his 100th Test in Brisbane, Pietersen gave a press conference in which he outlined just how good the atmosphere was within the team. He said: “It’s a nicer environment now. We’ve all grown up and actually grown a lot tighter. If you look at the environment now, it’s absolutely fantastic and I’m not lying and being real straight. We’re all having so much fun and that front page [of the Brisbane Courier-Mail newspaper] was so funny because ten hours before that we’d all had an amazing dinner. We all had such a great time together.” And yet, the book portrays the 2013-14 Ashes tour as a miserable place to be from the start. “The dressing room was sick all along,” he writes of the teams led by Cook and Strauss.
Which is not to say that Pietersen’s view of the world should be dismissed. Far from it. Merely not swallowed whole, although it should be enjoyed, written as it is with great flair and imagination by Walsh.
In many ways, this is a tale that is as old as the hills. Towards the end of the book, Pietersen says of dressing rooms in team sports: “People may think that they are places of milk and honey and soothing music but they are not. I had dinner in India one night not long ago with some great players from a few different countries... the stories that were swapped around would make your hair stand on end. I have rugby friends and football friends and the stories are all the same.” Everyone who has ever played cricket for England knows that to be the case.
There are a number of reasons why this particular tale became more rancorous. In no particular order they are: the relentlessness of modern schedules; the Indian Premier League (IPL); Twitter, the dynamics of this particular team, which saw the traditional batsmen versus bowlers clique magnified because the strongest characters were among the bowlers; the modern cult of the coach, which provided an added complication not experienced by players of an earlier generation who would have sorted out problems more directly; and Pietersen’s own complex character.
At the heart of the discord is the IPL, which Pietersen has embraced since its inception and about which he is, not surprisingly, unrepentant. He loves the IPL, the money, the glitz and glamour, the crowds and the friendships formed. Who wouldn’t? But it created problems, driving a jealous wedge between him and other senior players who did not get to enjoy a slice of the pie. During one Test match, Pietersen took himself off to watch his IPL team on television, which he admits was a crass thing to do.
Pietersen has warm words for the management team of Michael Vaughan and Duncan Fletcher, who brought him into the England fold. They encouraged him, nurtured him and valued him in a way that he believed those who followed — the “woodpecker” (forever pecking away) Peter Moores and Flower — never did. But it is also true to say that neither Vaughan nor Fletcher had to deal with the fallout from the IPL. They might have navigated those waters with greater skill, who knows, but it was a management problem they were spared.
Pietersen is an inveterate tweeter, but it was the parody account, @KPgenius, that hurt him more than anybody realised at the time and in this he must have our sympathy. The clique of James Anderson, Stuart Broad and Graeme Swann were sniggering about it behind his back during the summer of 2012, and Pietersen rightly wonders about the difference between this and the text messages about Strauss that he admits to sending to his South African friends.
“The Twitter business and all the behind-my-back sniggering was a clear case of bullying. People couldn’t say the same things face to face but they felt they could do it through the sneakier ways of social media. Hunting in a pack.” At one point in the book, Pietersen recalls breaking down in tears in front of Flower about it. Flower, for his part, has openly acknowledged he should have done more to nip that episode in the bud.
This, and the behaviour in the field of some of the senior bowlers to other, younger members of the team, was out of order. It struck many observers as odd when Broad or Anderson or Swann or Matt Prior would holler after mistakes, misfields or dropped catches. The strongest members of this team appeared to be the bowlers; the meekest (Cook, Ian Bell) being the batsmen, so opening up farther that age-old batsman-bowler feud.
This was 2012, an annus horribilis for Pietersen, including “textgate”, cyber-bullying, retirement from one-day cricket, being dropped in the middle of the South Africa Test series, left out of the World Twenty20 and having a central contract withheld pending good behaviour and “reintegration”. At that point, the story had seemed to reach its conclusion — and many within the ECB wished there had been no postscript (which was instigated by Flower, although Pietersen does not acknowledge that in the book).
Had such an ending occurred, it is unlikely that Pietersen would be in a position to publish such a book as this. As it was, reintegration happened; Pietersen played some gorgeous innings in India, the team disintegrated under a Mitchell Johnson-inspired rout, and Pietersen, alone, was sacked, a narrative outlined in detail in the book, but about which Pietersen remains puzzled. Whether the ECB gives added explanation remains to be seen.
Walsh, with many delightful phrases, has certainly turned Pietersen’s story into a compelling read. The tone is cruel (especially to Prior and Flower) in parts; regretful in others (multiple mistakes are acknowledged); elegiac, almost, in some places. At one stage, he reaches some kind of self-awareness, calling himself English by choice, but South African by nature. As a result, this is not a straightforward good guy/bad guy tale. It is more complex than that. One thing is certain, though: despite the olive branch held out to Cook, the “good guy”, Pietersen will not play for England again.