As a rule, Kevin Pietersen doesn’t find it easy talking himself down, but that is what he was doing ahead of his first encounter with the might of Australia in England colours tomorrow. He is ready to accept that England have made their decision about which 11 players they want to start the Ashes at Lord’s on July 21, and that he, an England cricketer who has stolen the limelight from Andrew Flintoff, is not one of them. He is probably right, though that is not to say he couldn’t change their minds with a fusillade of sixes over the next four weeks of one-dayers.
Surprisingly for such an upbeat individual, he doesn’t seem to be counting on that happening. “The side that played Bangladesh is the Test side, which is good,” he says. “The boys did well. They got what they wanted out of the game. They played good cricket. If it happens for me this year, it happens. But I’ve got 10 years left, so it’s not a huge train smash if I don’t make it this year. Andrew Strauss started playing for England at 27. I ’m 24, so I’ve a long way to go. I’m not thinking about July or August. I’m just thinking about what’s coming up this month. I want to play well for England, do well personally and win games.”
He would never admit it, but perhaps he knows things have happened too fast for him since he thundered onto the global stage with three cracking centuries in 12 days in South Africa last winter, the middle one in East London the fastest ever scored for England in a one-day international. Those performances created a monster of expectation. He admits the expectation affected his form in the first month of the season with his new club, Hampshire, who stage England’s inaugural Twenty20 match against Australia tomorrow.
“It made it difficult, although I didn’t let it get to me as much as it could have,” he says. “I didn’t score as many runs as I would have liked. Every time I got nothing, it was in the paper, and every time I got a score it was in the paper as well. It was difficult. But I’ve come through and shown I can come through. I didn’t have a great start, but the last month has been fantastic. I’ve got a couple of hundreds and three fifties, so it ’s all back on track. You’ve got to cash in when the going’s good.” His past six championship scores are 125, 126, 42, 0, 0 and 41. Overall, though, he has not done as much as he felt he needed to in order to put a Test place beyond doubt.
He says Shane Warne, his captain at Hampshire and somebody he would face in the Ashes, helped him come to terms with the hype. “He has been through thick and thin and has been a really good friend in the past few weeks,” Pietersen says. “He told me not to worry and just build an innings.”
Oh dear. No Ashes. Too much pressure. Too few runs. Whatever next? Well, during the South Africa tour, Pietersen let it be known he planned to get a Three Lions tattoo like Darren Gough’s before the tour was over. Had he got it done? “No.” Why not? “Needles . . . I’m scared of needles.” Scared of needles? Jeez, maybe he is a true Pom after all.
Pietersen, of course, is not a true Pom. He was born in Pietermaritzburg to an English mother and Afrikaner father and turned his back on South Africa at 19 because he felt his cricket career was being held back by positive discrimination that demanded each team play a quota of non-white players. “Why should I be punished for what people did through apartheid 20 or 30 years ago?” he said later.
On the back of a decent allround performance against the touring England side in one of 11 matches he played for Natal across two seasons, he secured a contract as Cannock’s professional in the Birmingham League for 2000. He hardly uprooted trees with bat or ball, but received decent write-ups in local papers highlighting the fact that he was looking for a county contract. It aroused interest among several Midlands counties. Warwickshire invited him to play for their seconds at Leamington Spa against Surrey, who were captained by Gareth Batty. Pietersen scored 92, but Warwickshire were looking for bowlers, not batsmen, and his 16 overs of off-spin produced one wicket. He wasn’t asked again.
Over at Trent Bridge, Clive Rice, the Notts coach, had also seen the notices and didn’t need to invite Pietersen for a trial. He phoned and said he was sending a contract. Rice, who had played a similar brand of can-do southern African cricket, remembered seeing Pietersen play in a schools tournament and was convinced of his potential. “In four years you will be playing for England,” Rice told him. Pietersen qualified for England last October and was playing for his new country within weeks.
“I didn’t know him well, but I liked what I saw,” Rice recalls. “I liked him as a fielder and a batsman. He’s been a bit lazy with his bowling. Having dealt with characters like Eddie Hemmings and Derek Randall as Notts captain, I had no doubt I could handle him. They were holding him back in South Africa.”
On his day, Pietersen is one of the most difficult batsmen in the world to bowl at. Like most dangerous hitters, he fails a high proportion of the time, but if he can get a start he can be as hard to shift as he is to keep quiet. His strengths are his power, size (6ft 4in), self-belief and competitiveness. He also has fantastic hand-eye coordination. He probably gets his competitiveness from being one of four brothers. He likes a challenge. During his first season with Notts, he predicted to a teammate, Paul Johnson, that he would score his first first-class century against Middlesex the next day, and duly did so. Last winter in South Africa he met all the targets Rice set him.
Rice recalls: “I told him first to score a hundred to make himself known. Then I told him to make a second to confirm he was a good player. Then I said score a third to be the man of the series.”
When the ball doesn’t deviate, Pietersen is a hugely destructive batsman who will pulverise ordinary bowling. He looks to treat spin bowling equally brutally, if his approach towards Warne last year and Mushtaq Ahmed this year is anything to go by. When the ball moves, he is liable to struggle, not least because he looks to play so many balls through the on-side. He bridles at the suggestion that he is an early leg-before candidate, although he has been leg-before for nought nine times in the past three years. “Leg-before for nought? It’s happened twice this season and I must have had 20 knocks. It’s not playing across the line. It’s just a technical thing. I’ve worked hard on it and sorted it out. I’ve only been out lbw twice this year and both were bad decisions.”
