It's tough being Kevin

	People may have plenty of reservations about Pietersen, but they do not concern his skills © Getty Images Enlarge
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A few weeks after the close of the 2012 season, Geoffrey Boycott used his pulpit in the Daily Telegraph to tell Kevin Pietersen some home truths. Cricket, he said, was a unique sport in the way it accommodated individuals within a team framework. He explained: "There is room for talented people because nobody wants to watch 11 robots. There is even room for awkward so-and-sos, as long as everyone is clear about the team objective and the individual doesn't put 'I' before 'team'." And he concluded: "When Alexandre Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers, their motto was exactly what it should be in cricket: 'All for one and one for all.' I think Kevin has forgotten that."

It was easy to imagine the derision in the Pietersen camp. Here was Boycott, the ultimate awkward so-and-so, championing the cause of the collective. Why, it was practically a definition of hypocrisy. Who could take him seriously? The answer, I suspect, is a substantial majority of the cricket- following public.

The English game has always revered its gifted nonconformists. From the likes of Compton and Trueman, through to Botham and Flintoff, special indulgence has been granted to those who ruffle the feathers and raise the spirits. Some may have feet of clay, others may be characters verging on caricatures, yet affectionate memory cherishes the purple passage, the golden hour. Pietersen has given us many such moments, yet affection continues to elude him. There are reasons for this, and most of them involve self-absorption, self-promotion and a distressing absence of self-awareness. Boycott's analysis feels uncomfortably accurate.

Clearly, things would have been far easier had the player not possessed so much talent. A mundane Test cricketer would have been cast aside with sympathetic platitudes and sighs of relief. Terms such as "difficult" and "disruptive" would have been murmured at unattributable briefings, and the phrase "not a team player" would have carried the force of a professional obituary.

But Pietersen is different, his ability unquestioned and his Test record formidable. He has achieved the kind of eminence which enables him to be known by his finest innings. There was the 158 to secure the 2005 Ashes at The Oval, and the nerveless 227 at Adelaide in 2010-11. Then, in 2012, came three of the finest innings the modern game has known: in Colombo, at Headingley, and most dramatically, most violently, at Mumbai.

His batting has also evoked comparisons with some of the great ones, most frequently Hammond and Dexter. Once, as I passed a bibulous lunch in the Harris Garden at Lord's, I heard an elderly member assert that Pietersen was "the closest thing to Jessop I've ever seen". Since the Croucher played his last Test in 1912, the claim seemed a touch implausible, yet heads nodded approvingly.

In fairness, the richness of Pietersen's talent can unhinge even the most sober of judges. When the mood is upon him, he bats like a demented philanthropist. His improvisations are stunning, his imagination is beguiling. He invents strokes, seemingly on a whim, and he has the eye, the timing and the grizzly strength to bring them off with a flourish. On such days, he reduces the science of field placing to a quivering lottery.

Similarly the bowling. One recalls the bellowing bewilderment of Dale Steyn as Pietersen flipped him through midwicket en route to his 149 at Headingley. Allan Donald, South Africa's bowling coach, described the performance as "the innings of a bit of a genius". No, reservations about Pietersen do not concern his skills.

Yet reservations exist, and they are both real and relevant. Indeed, they may be traced back to when he left his native land. He departed with a flounce, citing an unconvincing quarrel with the quota system. Certainly the move to England opened up the kind of commercial opportunities which were less easily available at home, yet his instincts and his attitudes remained essentially South African. As one of his former colleagues put it: "He even retained that famous South African sense of humour."

So his course was set. Aware that an English mother and four years' residence would enable him to play Test cricket for his adopted country, he worked unsparingly on his game. Just as nobody ever questioned Pietersen's ability, they never doubted his diligence. He had a proper respect for his own burgeoning talent, and he refined it over hour upon arduous hour in the county nets at Nottingham.

But still popularity evaded him. Some tell us he has always wanted to be loved. Others, more perceptively, observe he has a strange way of showing it. In the course of a distinguished career, Jason Gallian played three Tests for England and scored more than 15,000 first-class runs, yet he is destined to be chiefly remembered as the Nottinghamshire captain who hurled Pietersen's kit from the dressing-room balcony at Trent Bridge.

Earlier in the match, Pietersen had told his skipper he wasn't happy, that the pitch wasn't up to his standards, and that he wanted to leave. He said he was surprised and disappointed at Gallian's reaction. He joined his chum Shane Warne at Hampshire in the winter of 2004, won his first Test cap the following season, and made just one Championship appearance for the county in the next five years. "Geographically, it just doesn't work," explained Pietersen, helpfully. "I live in Chelsea." Before joining Surrey, he thanked all and sundry "for the support I have had during my time at the Rose Bowl". Once again, he seemed surprised when his departure was not widely mourned.

	The English game has always revered its gifted nonconformists, those who ruffle the feathers and raise the spirits © Getty Images Enlarge

In this respect, as in many others, his reactions resemble those of the professional footballer. Loyalty to club or country is often lightly bestowed. When Pietersen first started playing for England, he said: "You are brought up to be loyal to the country you are in, but I have never been totally patriotic to South Africa." Upon touring that country, he announced: "I just sat back and laughed at the opposition, with their swearing and 'traitor' remarks... Some of them can hardly speak English. My affiliation is with England. In fact, I'm going to get a tattoo, with three lions and my number underneath... No one can say I'm not English."

The power of the trite gesture: kiss a badge, choose a tattoo, assert your allegiance with a needle. As football long since discovered, it is a crashingly simple and curiously effective ploy.

England were swift to embrace this stunning talent. He announced himself during that tumultuous Ashes series of 2005, and set a pace which rarely faltered. Occasionally, there would be
criticism of a reckless dismissal, but his sheer weight of runs provided an eloquent response. They gave him celebrity status, and he greeted it like an old mate. No longer Kevin Pietersen, he became "KP", maker of headlines and friend of the famous. The brighter the spotlight, the more he appeared to relish it. As England captain, Michael Vaughan handled him astutely. "You can see how he winds people up, but he just needs managing," Vaughan would say.

Managing him was one thing, but giving him the keys to the train set was quite another. The captaincy of England demands all manner of qualities which Pietersen quite clearly has never possessed. And yet, in the face of all the evidence, he was chosen to succeed Vaughan. He lasted for three Tests and five months before the ECB sacked him, a removal they presented as a resignation. The details of his ham-fisted attempt to depose coach Peter Moores are now the stuff of history, although when they come to write the textbook of witlessly incompetent coups, they may well find space for the Pietersen Manoeuvre, which involves issuing a "back me or sack me" ultimatum before disappearing on a winter-sun holiday in South Africa.

As ever, the small incidents stuck in the mind. There was his eager espousal of the terminally naff. He once asked for a meeting with Simon Cowell, and emerged, star-struck, to declare: "That guy's a legend!" Then, shortly before the infamous Stanford tournament in Antigua, he fatuously insisted he would be as keyed up as on the first morning of an Ashes series. Little things, yet they illustrated an attitude which was hopelessly ill-suited to the task of leading the national team.

England were fortunate in that the entire, turbulent affair enabled them to give the job to the man who ought to have had it in the first place, and Andrew Strauss became one of the finest Test captains of the modern era. Yet they were also fortunate in Pietersen's response to his reduction to the ranks. Piqued, he simply toiled at his technique. His consolation came in his enormously lucrative association with the Indian Premier League, a competition which helped lift him from mere affluence to genuine wealth.

And Strauss appreciated the efforts his predecessor was making. "Nine- tenths of my time as England captain, I found him a good guy to have in my team," he would say. "He set the right example in practice, and I felt he could have been far more resentful of me in the sense that he had been removed as captain before I took over." From time to time, Pietersen's real feelings would emerge, as in the aftermath of the successful Ashes defence in 2010-11: "You know what, I have never said this before, but I got rid of the captaincy for the good of English cricket, and we would not be here today if I had not done what I did then." Thus was history bizarrely rewritten.

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 esigned to threaten, but came out in the manner of Miss Violet Elizabeth Bott: "I'll scream and scream until I'm sick!"

	Michael Vaughan: "You can see how he winds people up, but he just needs managing" © Getty Images Enlarge

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 he 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 cliche ́s.

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.