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As Kevin Pietersen chucks his hand baggage in the overhead locker and takes out his journey comforts (iPod, Bose headphones, Machiavelli's Il Principe), does he look around the business-class section and his England colleagues, and wonder which of them brought him down?

Does he look at Andrew Strauss and wonder about the masterly inaction that got the new captain appointed in his place? Does he look at Stephen Harmison, for whom he risked a great deal, and wonder why the fast bowler did not return the favour? Does he look at Andrew Flintoff and say: “Et tu, Freddie?”

Does he look for his closest ally and then realise that he had no closest ally? Pietersen has always been a man apart, marooned on the desert island of his egotism, but, as the England team leave for four Tests and five one-day internationals in the West Indies in less than a fortnight, does he feel lonely for the first time in his life?

Does he feel angry, resentful, bewildered? Does he, above all, believe himself the victim of a conspiracy? Has he stumbled upon one of the greatest and most deeply hidden truths in sport: that more than any other sport, cricket is a game of intrigue, plot, stratagem, counter-plot, confederacy, cabal, complicity, collusion, connivance and scheming, not to mention machination, manoeuvring and engineering.

My cricket shelves groan with plot and intrigue: Ian Botham on Peter Roebuck and the dismissal of Joel Garner and Viv Richards at Somerset; Mike Atherton on his running war with Ray Illingworth; Geoffrey Boycott on absolutely everything.

I wrote such a book myself. Phil Edmonds was its subject, a man who shared something of Pietersen's arrogance and his southern African upbringing, but who had something Pietersen lacks: a fascination with the world beyond himself and an intermittently voracious curiosity about people who intrigued him.

The book centres on the unending feud between Edmonds and Mike Brearley, captain of Middlesex and England. Both men chose to speak up about it, with extraordinary frankness and more than a pinch of regret.

The on-pitch action naturally takes second place to the extended drama of intertwined lives, a relationship that reached its low point when Edmonds, the England twelfth man, seized Brearley, the England captain, by the shirt-front during the tea interval. Cambridge degrees in common do wonders for a civilised relationship.

That's cricket. Uniquely among sports, it offers the opportunity for plot and counter-plot. I came across a few lines that cover the situation perfectly: “As a captain must be able to act like a beast, he should learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion does not defend himself against traps, and the fox does not defend himself against wolves. So one has to be a fox in order to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves.”

I cheated there. For “captain”, read “prince”, for this is, of course, Machiavelli. Much of the great work stands up if retitled “Il Capitano” and related entirely to cricket: “A captain never lacks legitimate reason to break his promise,” for example. “Whoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.” And, perhaps most importantly: “Before all else, be armed.”

These labyrinthine complexities do not exist in other sports. This is hardly surprising. There simply isn't the opportunity. Oh, there are dressing-room kerfuffles and sulks and cliques in football, but how can you work them up into something Machiavellian when, on an average training day, all you have is a few minutes in the changing-room followed by a couple of hours in which you spend most of your time mouth-breathing?

A match lasts 90 minutes and you spend all of it running and shouting. No chance to get in a huddle. So, yes, there are tensions and bad vibes and the occasional spot of fisticuffs in every football team, but nothing that compares to cricket's gorgeous scale of intrigue.

In rugby union, they make a big thing of unity. Danny Cipriani, the London Wasps and England fly half, got a whack in the face from a club-mate for being a prat, but once that was done he was able to carry on with his routine of poncing about and getting charged down. That's the way it goes in rugby.

But only cricket has the time for serious plotting among the players. Cricket, more than any other sport, has its being in time. A Test match can last five days and for almost all that time, evenings included, players are mostly with players. A tour can last three months; players with players. A county season lasts half a year, in which time you are almost always with players.

Players are your life, your wife, your universe. How can they not plot and intrigue, form alliances, fall out, make up, gather round some charismatic figure, sense that figure waning and transfer allegiance?

Take a week off with a sore thumb, come back and the entire political landscape has changed.

The stakes are worth playing for. Everything revolves around the captaincy, the greatest prize in team sport so far as power is concerned. A cricket captain has something close to the power of life and death over his colleagues. You need to be the captain, or the captain's friend. Edmonds complained that Brearley never gave him the field he wanted and hardly ever gave him a bowl. He was always last choice; team-mates called him “Chanel No 5”.

Cricketers, uniquely in team sports, have much contact with those in management and coaching. The downtime, when your side are batting, favours the making of alliances and, for that matter, enmities. There are always opportunities to do so among the team, their ancillaries and the opposition.

The nature of the game encourages a subtle and thoughtful approach to life's problems. What's more, every team hold the seeds of disruption, being divided already into batsmen and bowlers. Ancient snobberies and anti-snobberies add spice to this mixture.

Now, all these things exist in different forms in every team sport, but only cricket has the timescale in which these things can develop properly: seethe, suppurate and fester. And then it's all over and you step back and say: “What the hell was that all about?”

“I sometimes wonder if our personality clash could have been avoided,” Edmonds mused, as the tape hissed on and the level in the bottle fell. “Or whether it was the inevitable result of human chemistry. It was unfortunate that our relationship soured to such an extent that all I could see in a man of indubitably excellent qualities were his little mincing steps and his bitchiness towards me.”

And so the England team, riven with divisions, shaken apart by the latest bitch-fight, their most dangerous player utterly alienated, with a tyro captain who got the job by default, no head coach, rent by schism, united only in resentment of the former captain, can now seriously begin to limp their way towards Cardiff for the Ashes.