Video: Pietersen resigns | Video: Pietersen's press conference

Strauss asked to pick up the pieces | England's flawed genius | Atherton: Strauss must heal England's rifts | CMJ: England's captain-coach relationship vital | Pietersen: gamble that failed when going got tough | Atherton: Ashes now depends on Pietersen's reaction | County executives back Moores to return | Pietersen is oblivious as cricket world collapses around him

Kevin Pietersen is like the actor who asked what he was supposed to do in the pauses. “What pauses?” asked the director, who prided himself on the paciness of his productions. “You know — the pauses when other people speak.”

Pietersen has never been comfortable with that Other People thing. He has never quite got his mind around the fact that there are people who do their stuff in the world for reasons entirely unrelated to Kevin Pietersen. Small wonder that he didn’t make it as captain of the England cricket team.

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• Pietersen's England career

He nearly did. That’s the sadness of it. The tour of India in the aftermath of the Mumbai atrocities was a personal and moral triumph for Pietersen’s leadership. It seemed that he was so determined on his own greatness that he was even prepared to expand his world vision beyond himself. But, in the end, less than six months after he was appointed, his dysfunctional understanding of the way other people operate set up this dramatic and, in truth, really rather absurd confrontation.

There is an innocence about Pietersen, something he shares with another great batsman and disaster-prone England cricketer, Geoff Boycott. They share a strange bewilderment that other people fail to see the world in the same terms, as a Boycott-centric, or a KP-centric, place. Each has walked through cricket, oblivious as Buster Keaton while the landscape collapsed all around them.

Throughout his life, Pietersen has been disappointed by the world. His response, on every occasion, has been not to change himself but to change the world. When he comes across an uncomfortable truth, he gets rid of it, like Sir Alan Sugar firing an apprentice. The only reason that he became an England cricketer was because he sacked an entire country.

South Africa had let him down: you’re fired! At a stroke, Pietersen was English. He joined Nottinghamshire; that didn’t work out: you’re fired! And he joined Hampshire. England seemed to provide the golden road for his colossal and undeniable talent. He became England captain — but didn’t care for the coach, Peter Moores. You’re fired!

No one could have been more startled than Pietersen when the England and Wales Cricket Board chose to understand Pietersen’s ultimatum as a resignation. You could almost hear Pietersen saying: “Hang on! I’m not resigning me! I’m resigning him!” Alas, poor Kev: the world doesn’t work like that.

There are always very special tensions in any cricket team, and for that matter, in most cricketing individuals. That’s because the game itself exists on the tensions between individual and corporate achievement: this is a team game based on individual duels. More tensions stem from the fact that a cricket captain has more power than any player in any team sport in the world.

Pietersen’s illiteracy when it comes to other people, his near-autistic understanding of things such as friendships and enmities and joys and worries, always isolated him as a player. This only increased when he was made captain. He might have won the Moores battle if the boys were all behind him: but they weren’t. He lost too many on the way, and that is why he has gone. You’re fired!

Pietersen inhabits an auto-centric universe. This is his indelible flaw: it is also his impossible virtue.

His unsnubbable self-belief has made him the most dangerous batsman in the world. It was this singularity of nature that allowed him to play one of the most extraordinary innings in Test history to secure the Ashes for England in 2005.

The ECB took a punt that a brilliance centred on self could be transformed into a brilliance of leadership that, by necessity, would take other people into account. It might even have worked. But it didn’t. And it was not the fault of Other People at all.