I’LL TELL you what; that was one spiteful delivery that accounted for Kevin Pietersen in the first innings in Galle. If I had been KP, having all but managed to get a glove out of the way, I would have had to shrug, walk off and give the bowler, Lasith Malinga, most of the credit, with the rest due to the pitch.

Looking at it time after time with the replays, my conclusion was that Pietersen had got it 98% right. Malinga had put two men back on the hook, knowing that the bounce was a little unpredictable and that if the batsman went for it, there was a good chance he might not be able to control the shot. Pietersen, recognising the threat, still early in his innings, had obviously decided to use his height to defend the short ball and was entitled to believe that that particular ball would not bounce as high as it did.

Someone of KP’s class will assess the trajectory from the bowler’s hand and will already be subconsciously computing the pace and bounce that it is reasonable to expect. He will also be watching the ball intently to assess any change. By the time the ball has pitched halfway down, let’s say he has between 0.20 and 0.25 of a second to spot the beginnings of that extra bounce and readjust. After that, it is in the lap of the gods whether your next action turns out to be good enough. All he could do was rue the fact that he had been so close to avoiding contact and keeping his wicket intact.

It was the sort of snarling, rising delivery that reminded me of the great Malcolm Marshall – only he seemed to produce more of them than Malinga. There is a Patrick Eagar photograph in my downstairs loo of me facing Marshall at The Oval in 1984. I have left the ground, dropped the wrists on it and wrenched my head out of the line of the ball, which is on the way through to Jeff Dujon, a long way behind the stumps.

It was one of those balls that lives in your memory. The caption could have read: “What the **** was that?” If you want to say, “Well played”, that’s fine, but the main reason I got out of the way of that one was simply that it bounced too much. KP’s bounced just enough to be exactly the wrong height. Such is cricket.

It was another disappointment for him on a tour on which he has underachieved. No doubt annoyingly for him, people are starting to ponder if he has a susceptibility to the short ball. It does not take much for theories to be developed. There are examples of him falling to the short ball. Glenn McGrath bounced him out in Sydney last winter, then poleaxed him in the ODI at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, breaking a rib. However, you can hardly say Pietersen was intimidated by the Aussie – he was advancing down the track at the time!

Against that, one must remember how he took on Brett Lee at The Oval in the Ashes of 2005. It was thrilling stuff and, by definition, risky, but he had the courage to go with the hook shot and it worked on the day.

Opposition spies are well aware of what he can do in that respect, and teams are now setting challenging fields. He has the all-too-obvious desire to dominate at the crease; it is part of his personality and the way he plays. So captains will put the two men back to test his ability to pick and choose his shots, to see if his ego will lead him into danger. It forces him to consider his options and work out the percentages, hence his decision to try to defend against the Malinga bouncer.

Even the very best batsmen can be unsettled or dismissed by a good short ball. Ricky Ponting, one of the finest exponents of the hook and pull today, has been hit hard on the visor or the helmet on occasion. Viv Richards, the best of his era, took a few blows to the head here and there, but had the great ability to shrug them off.

Batsmen have to work out what is the best course for them individually, knowing that short balls will always be part of the diet.

In a way yesterday’s dismissal, caught at short midwicket, highlights this.

Mahela Jayawardene was still challenging Pietersen’s will to dominate, with men slightly deeper behind him to encourage the firmer shot. Again, the choice for the batsman was to defend boringly until Sri Lanka were forced to rethink, or to continue to play those familiar flowing shots. The boring option was the one to take. If then Jayawardene had responded by bringing more men in close, Pietersen would most likely have been able to take advantage of the new spaces behind the close men.

I was reminded of Ian Botham in 1982 in Madras, eschewing his normal bravado to block the India spinners for hours. It was incredibly boring but effective and was exactly what was required by the situation. It revealed a side of Ian that we did not know existed.

Pietersen will pick up thing like this as he goes along. He likes to think of himself as someone who works hard at his game – he certainly promotes himself as such – so these are challenges that he must deal with. I can only say again, as I have done previously when analysing his prodigious talent, that there are no real reasons why a player of his ability should not be able to “make a plan”, as they say in that part of the world in which he was raised, that works.