First there was the win, then there was the other win and then there was the cold, dead-eyed, relentless slaughter. England have murdered a top order before, but they rarely follow it by sweeping up the tail and leaving everywhere really nice and tidy.

South Africa 85 all out and a ten wicket win. Just what has Kevin Pietersen done to effect such a comprehensive turnabout in English fortunes?

Well, clearly he’s sold his soul to the devil, to which we say, ‘excellent bartering, KP - who needs a soul anyway?’

In a good light, this one-day team looks tip-top: batting down to nine, plentiful bowlers and four seamers who top 90mph. Regarding the four fast bowlers, there should be some sort of stamp of legitimacy for these speed guns, like the lion mark for toys; something that means ‘not artificially bumped up by 3mph’. Maybe Steve Harmison did bowl a 94mph yorker in his first over. Maybe he didn’t.

Anyway, that’s England in a good light. In a bad light, you’ve got batting collapses, opening bowlers who get carted and Steve Harmison’s back-up radar that he saves for special occasions.

But there is no bad light any more, because of soulless Kevin. Now there WOULD be an achievement: no bad light.

Tags: England, Kevin Pietersen by King Cricket
19 Comments »

We’ve never been so proud.

We asked: ‘Why haven’t you adopted a comedy English accent, like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins?‘

After some thinking out loud, Pietersen concludes that he says ‘pie’ with a northern accent.

Sometimes the stars align and everything goes your way.

In next month’s issue of The Wisden Cricketer, we persuade someone to ask Rob Key whether he minds being followed round by a furtive-looking person in a trilby and sunglasses who watches him through two eyeholes cut into a newspaper. Rob answers that he likes it and wants to make friends with that evasive weirdo.

Tags: Kevin Pietersen by King Cricket
10 Comments »

Not literally. That would be hideous. (No, we’re never going to spurn an opportunity to make that joke.)

In this month’s issue of The Wisden Cricketer, Kevin Pietersen is asked whether Mark Ramprakash deserves a place in the England side.

“You have a look at his results since the media descended and it shows the character, doesn’t it?”

Pietersen is of course referring to the period after Ramprakash’s 99th hundred. We’ve heard similar things from a few people, but haven’t been particularly convinced. However, we read Pietersen’s interview about five minutes after Ramprakash had hit 200 against Somerset - his 101st first-class hundred.

His hundredth hundred had been in his previous innings and his 99th had been 11 innings before that. There’s certainly no disgrace in going 11 innings without a hundred, but the fact that he then rattled off two on the bounce (one a double) highlights the fact that Ramprakash has higher standards than other batsmen.

Some will take a black and white view on Ramprakash’s temperament, but we’re more inclined towards grey. He did get that hundredth hundred after all.

Tags: Kevin Pietersen, Mark Ramprakash by King Cricket
9 Comments »

We’re always suspicious of ‘natural talent’. Kevin Pietersen always seems to attract this commendation - usually from Mark Nicholas. Nicholas closes his eyes and purrs every time KP hoicks one to leg and it’s surely only a matter of time before he affixes himself to the captain’s leg like a dog during the end of day interview.

Anyway, we’re getting off track with all this cat/dog confusion. The point is ‘natural talent’ (which we’re going to persist in putting in inverted commas). There’s a nice quote in a Guardian article about KP by Jon Henderson. It’s the sports coach at Maritzburg College where Pietersen played in his teens:

“No, he wasn’t a special player at all at that stage, but he was a hell of a determined guy with a good work ethic.”

Apparently he didn’t even get in the first team until another spinner emigrated. So Pietersen’s ‘natural talent’ only really manifested itself in adulthood after he’d put in loads and loads of effort.

We don’t know the ins and outs of how children develop hand-eye coordination, but we’d hazard that any cricketer who is deemed to have ‘natural talent’ has in fact overwhelmingly acquired his hand-eye coordination through some form of practice.

Don Bradman famously spent hours and hours hitting a golf ball against a water tank with a stump. It’s a fiendishly difficult thing to pull off and we’d like to know just how shit he was at it when he started.

So what’s our point? Er, it’s probably just that we’d prefer it if commentators would stop talking about ‘natural talent’ like it was a plain fact. Sometimes they use it to explain things and that’s a questionable line of thinking.

Tags: Kevin Pietersen by King Cricket
18 Comments »

There you go. We’ve nailed our colours to the mast and those assorted greys and beiges that you can see fluttering in the breeze indicate our lack of hatred for Kevin Peter Pietersen (yes, that’s his real middle name).

More than that, we don’t quite get why so many people do hate him. He plays for England, averages 50, scores his runs with a clomping glee and is one of the few batsmen in the world who can explode from being smothered by the bowlers and instead make them run scared. He’s amazing.

Maybe it’s the caricature of him as an arrogant mercenary who’s only interested in personal glory. That’s a simplistic depiction.

The treachery of his switch of allegiance goes hand in hand with the iron-willed and successful pursuit of his ambitions; the arrogance is just his toeing the line of supreme, but largely justified, self confidence; and the attention-seeking switch hitting is just a pragmatic way of hitting gaps in the field. When the ball goes for four, the end justifies the means.

We’ve every reason to believe he’ll be a decent England captain. Maybe even a great one. He has little experience, but his track record of achieving what he sets out to do is staggering.

He was a number eight in South African domestic cricket. He came to England, averaged 50, hit four hundreds in four innings on an England A tour to India, then hit three hundreds in five one-day innings against the country of his birth almost immediately after being promoted to the one-day side. If he thinks he can make England successful, it’s worth giving him a go.

We thought that Pietersen should have been made captain when the one-day job was up for grabs. He’s a thinking batsman who comes up with some unconventional solutions. Hopefully he’ll adopt a similar approach with his captaincy.

Tags: England, Kevin Pietersen by King Cricket
7 Comments »

That was as good as a certainty, wasn’t it?

Kevin Pietersen likes a big match. He must be driven by stomach butterflies or something. We’re not quite sure how that would work, because even our rudimentary scientific knowledge tells us that there aren’t actually butterflies in there.

He went out to bat in the middle of England losing three wickets in as many overs. He was playing a Test against the country of his birth for the first time. He scores a remorseless hundred.

We particularly like the way he’s got no time at all for the bowling of Paul Harris. Yes, it’s tactical, but Pietersen tries to hit him out of the attack with a malicious glee.

Ian Bell did himself no end of good today as well. We wonder whether he read about Graham Thorpe this morning, because he adopted that very approach: 15 minutes of heart-in-mouth, counter-punching near-calamity leading to easy accumulation.

England v South Africa first Test at Lord’s, day one
England 309-3 (Kevin Pietersen 104 not out, Ian Bell 75 not out, Alastair Cook 60)

Tags: England, Kevin Pietersen, South Africa by King Cricket
2 Comments »

Paul Collingwood’s been banned for four matches for England’s slow over rate and Kevin Pietersen’s picked up the reigns to the haggard, lifeless horse that is the England one-day side. We’re not unhappy about this. We’ve said before that we think Kevin Pietersen would make a half-decent captain.

KP said he was ‘humbled’ by this ‘ultimate honour’.

This is clearly bollocks. KP’s never been humbled by anything in his life, because he’s got that unusual belief that he’s better than everyone else. Generally speaking this is an insanely irritating characteristic in a person, but it’s a pretty handy attribute for elite sportsmen.

The very best cricketers have been the ones who can defy reason and bend a match to their will: Botham, Richards, Warne. You can’t triumph against the odds without that faintly delirious, essentially unjustified belief in yourself. Pietersen isn’t remotely close to this company, but we’re not going to criticise him for having that mentality. If nobody thought like that, cricket would be all the more banal and predictable.

We’re not saying that Pietersen’s the best batsman in the world, because he isn’t. He is however an extremely good cricketer and a big part of his cricketing make-up is that self-assurance. That and mascara.

So when he pretends that he’s humble, we don’t mind. He knows that he’s supposed to be like that to be more likeable. However, we don’t for one minute want him to actually feel that way for real. So a blatant lie about being ‘humbled’ is the best he can do in our eyes.

Tags: England, Kevin Pietersen by King Cricket
13 Comments »

Kevin Pietersen said: “That is a new shot, played today” after twice reversing his stance and whopping Scott Styris for six. No it isn’t. It’s batting left-handed. People have been batting left-handed for a while now.

It’s a new approach though, even if it’s not a new shot. Is it unfair? Batting wrong-handed should be anything but an advantage if you take field placings out of consideration.

One of the best things we’ve heard said about it came from Nasser Hussain, who basically advocated Bodyline. If the batsman reverses his stance and you find yourself with three leg slips and a leg gully all of a sudden, then bowl to that field.

Not that one-day cricket often features three slips and a gully, but that’s one-day cricket. It’s about hitting boundaries, not taking wickets. Would a batsman be so keen to ’switch hit’ in a Test? The hook shot’s tricky enough when you play it the usual way round.

Tags: England, Kevin Pietersen by King Cricket
5 Comments »

“What did you say, you little bastard?”

KP suffered a dislocated little finger and severe bruising to his fist shortly after this picture was taken.

Tags: Kevin Pietersen, lies about pictures by King Cricket
4 Comments »

That’s what Simon Hughes said on Channel 5’s highlights programme, so that’s what happened.

It’s probably wrong to mock commentators’ slips of the tongue when you yourself forget 98 percent of your vocabulary whenever you have to talk in front of more than one person, or to a stranger, or on the phone, or in public, or when you’re tired.

Kevin Pietersen managed to squeeze in a hundred before he slightly fatiguely waved at a wide one. He was at the crease when England were 86-5 and while there are any number of articles stating just how many matches it’s been since England scored 400 plus in their first innings, we’re not sure this was ever going to be the match where they put that right.

They say it’s the new stand that’s helping the swing, but the ball’s been swinging at Trent Bridge for ages. We were there in 2005 on the day that Matthew Hoggard and Simon Jones, England’s biggest swingers (in a good way), reduced Australia to 58-4.

So Kevin Pietersen’s hundred might prove pretty handy. We’ll have to wait and see how New Zealand’s innings goes.

England v New Zealand, third Test at Trent Bridge
England 273-7 (Kevin Pietersen 115, Tim Ambrose 67, Iain O’Brien 4-61, Kyle Mills 3-58)

Tags: England, Kevin Pietersen, New Zealand by King Cricket
3 Comments »