Unfortunate and highly inconvenient as it is, Kevin Pietersen has got what he asked for. For all his wayward genius as a batsman, he was in no position, even as England's captain, to issue, through his newspaper column what could be taken as an ultimatum that he was unprepared to continue with Peter Moores as the coach.

In the cricket world, anyway, the days of such autocracy are gone: they went, altogether, when the amateur ceased to exist, if not with Lord Hawke in the 1890s. The appointment, last summer, of Pietersen as Michael Vaughan's successor as England's captain seemed well worth the risk. He was known to be something of a loose cannon, but he is a wonderfully talented and exciting cricketer, and England were in a rut.

In his short time as captain the impression he created was of a forceful personality, eager for the ride but lacking tactical ingenuity and more likely to overplay his hand off the field than on it.

The position of coach to the England side is a relatively recent one. The view of the old-timers still is that anyone chosen to play for England should have passed the need for coaching, though that is probably too simplistic. Tiger Woods, after all, travels nowhere without his coach. What is so infinitely depressing in this cricketing case is the failure of Pietersen and Moores to establish a modus operandi, and of the England and Wales Cricket Board to make it its business to see that they did.

BACKGROUND

• I knew it would end in tears, says Mike Atherton

• Odds stacked against first-time gamblers

• Pietersen 'resigns as England captain'

• Pietersen and Moores need to eat humble pie

Times Archive, 1974: Boycott walks out

To an uncommon degree, Boycott is a man driven by personal ambition. This being so he finds it more difficult than most to accept a subordinate position

• Times Archive: Sport

Today few outside the England party are even aware of the manager's name. The coach is the identifiable one. When I started, the manager was answerable for most things other than on the field, and as often as not he was a county secretary taking a winter off. This gave the captain more or less a free hand so far as the cricket was concerned. When England won the Ashes under Len Hutton in Australia in 1954-55, Geoffrey Howard, the secretary of Lancashire, was the manager, though arguably the most influential figure in the whole party was George Duckworth, a former England wicketkeeper and as well respected as he was loved by all who knew him. He would have stood no nonsense from Pietersen, and Pietersen would have known it from the time he came on board.

Howard, Duckworth and a masseur were the only appendices to the party; on England's forthcoming tour of the West Indies there will be a dozen or more.

When choosing the captain and manager, MCC, which then ran the game, tried to make sure there was compatibility between the two. The captain was chosen first and was usually given the chance not only to think well of his manager but to blackball any player he would rather be without. But the manager's was a much less exposed job than it is today. The coach's is more important and more demanding. When things go wrong, not to have played Test cricket (as in Moores's case) can make the incumbent more vulnerable to criticism, though there have been many fine coaches who never did. By no means all the best schoolteachers are themselves scholars.

On the tours I covered when the relationship between captain and manager was not entirely harmonious, either the two of them soon established a working relationship or the press made little, if anything, of it, being more easily satisfied than they are today. In India in 1963-64 David Clark, the manager, had found a more or less kindred spirit in Mike Smith, the captain. Seven years later, as manager in Australia, he was constantly at loggerheads with Ray Illingworth, but England still won the Ashes.

Clark had not played Test cricket, and Illingworth went his own way. It was not dissimilar from today's situation, but Illingworth didn't have a newspaper column in which to stir things up and would have been too savvy for that anyway.

Some years ago, when Andrew Strauss was starting out on his England career, a Radley housemaster I was talking to said that of all the boys he had taught there was none he would choose ahead of Strauss with whom to find himself up a gum tree. England are fortunate to have such a good fellow to see them through this present extremity.

Without being quite the player that John Edrich was, Strauss puts me very much in mind of him in the way he plays. That is a good start. Leadership will come to him, not somewhat restlessly as it did with Pietersen but more with, say, Colin Cowdrey's equanimity, and because he has been brought up to it.

Strauss will regret what has happened, I am sure, but no captain will have taken the field with a side more determined to sort themselves out. He will have to put up with every eye being on his every move. As for Pietersen, if he is the man he thinks he is, he will show cricket lovers in the Caribbean the sort of brilliant and abandoned strokeplay that they used to expect of their own. As captain, Pietersen has had all too short a reign; but he has himself largely to blame for that and he can still attain his declared ambition of making 10,000 runs for England. And with his full support, England should still have just as good a chance of regaining the Ashes this summer as if nothing had happened.

John Woodcock was cricket correspondent of The Times from 1954 to 1988

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