They call him The Ego; here he comes, striding from the entrance of his posh
riverfront apartment on a grey Tuesday morning in London. A chauffeur-driven
car awaits with engine humming. “What are we doing?” he inquires, sliding
into the warm leather seats. Jo Lavers, his minder for the day, has prepared
his agenda.
“We’re on our way to The Oval. The Sunday Times will interview you there,” she
says.
“Right.”
“Then we’ve got the Mail on Sunday magazine for 20 minutes to half an hour.”
“Yeah.”
“Then a photo-shoot with the car.”
“I don’t have any England tracksuits,” he announces. “I was in a bit of a mood
when I broke the old rib and left them all in Australia.”
“That’s okay,” Jo says, “you’re fine as you are.”
“How long will it take?” he asks.
“We should be finished by lunchtime. This is Steve, your driver. Do you want
him to take you back here when you’re finished, or somewhere else?”
“Back here, please.” The car pulls away and turns left into York Road. He sits
back, cradling his mobile phone and gazes out the window like royalty.
Even now, defeated and bruised, still a Master of the Universe.
“Is this the car?” he asks. “Yes, the new Touareg,” Jo replies. “It’s an
updated version of the one you had for the Fifth Gear day; this is the most
powerful one, the V10.”
“What do you have in your garage?” I ask.
“I drive the Phaeton. I’ve also got a VW Eos and an Aston Martin DB9.”
“What about the Porsche 911?”
“No, sold that,” he says. “The Phaeton is the easiest to drive; it’s a
magnificent car.” “You won’t pull any birds with it,” I suggest.
“I don’t need to pull any birds,” he says and smiles.
“So is that it?” “Is that what?” he asks. “Love,” I reply. “Yeah, I’m engaged
now; I’m all done on the birds front. I’m getting married this year; I’m a
very happy man.”
“How do you know?” I ask. “How do I know?” “That she’s the one?” “You just
know,” he says. “It’s difficult to describe, but I think you just know.”
His mobile phone rings. It’s the one, Jessica Taylor from Liberty X.
“Hi, darling,” he says.
Assured, egotistical, confident, proud . . . but surprisingly soft-centred as
well.
“Do you remember the last time we spoke?” I ask.
“I remember the face,” he says, glancing at me curiously. “When was it?”
“The Hyatt Hotel in Perth in December,” I reply. “I was standing by the
toaster at the breakfast buffet.”
“The Hyatt?” “Yes. There was a sign beside the toaster: ‘Please use tongs when
handling bread’, but you picked up two slices with your fingers and didn’t
take kindly when I pointed to the sign. I thought you were going to hit me.
‘It’s my toast’, you snapped. ‘I’ll do whatever I like with it’.”
“Oh yesss,” he recalls. “Sorry about that . . . there were times on that tour
when I was a very grumpy person — you obviously caught me on a morning when
someone said something to me. Was that the day after [Adam] Gilchrist killed
us?”
“No,” I reply, “it was three days before.”
“Yeah, well, it could easily have happened. You’re so highly strung all the
time. I’d go down to breakfast in the lift and some bloke would say
something snide; I came out of a nice restaurant with Jess and her mum and
was called the worst names you will ever hear. You try not to react, but . .
.”
“What was said?” “No, I’m not going to repeat it. It was nasty; it was racial;
it was really bad. I was waiting for a taxi outside this restaurant on the
third night of the Sydney Test with Jess and her mum. The guy was about 18.
It was really embarrassing. I had to apologise to Jess’s mum. At the cricket
ground you can cop whatever — that’s fine, but when you’re walking down the
street . . .”
“Did that happen often?” “I don’t want this to be an interview slagging off
Australia,” hecautions. “I enjoyed the cricket; the challenge was fantastic;
the rivalry on the field was magnificent, I loved it, but you don’t need
people giving you a hard time; you’re copping it on the field; you’re
copping it off the field; you’re copping it in taxis and walking to the bus.
“You drive to the ground and you’ve all these Aussies swearing, ‘Five-nil’ at
you. You get to the one-dayers and the first sign you see at the Twenty20
game is ‘Six-nil’. Mentally it just kills you, it really finishes you off.
Somebody just has to tip at you, and if you’ve had a bad day, well . . . and
to be fair, we didn’t have many good days, so it was hard, really hard.”
“Mentally it just kills you.” Who would ever have believed Pietersen would
say something like that?
We have reached The Oval, where Jo has organised a splendid room with a
magnificent view of the ground. In his recent autobiography, Crossing The
Boundary, Pietersen described his first Test hundred here when England
recaptured the Ashes in September 2005 as “the day that changed my life”.
“Does it feel that long ago now?” I ask.
“After this series, yeah, it seems a fair smack away, especially after what’s
happened in the past three or four months.”
“Okay, take me back to the start of the series and the build-up. The mood in
the team was reported as upbeat and confident on the day before the first
Test in Brisbane, but on what was that confidence based?”
“Before a series, once you’ve got the Ashes and you know that all you need is
a draw [to retain them], then you’re going to be confident. You hold what
they want. They’ve got to come out and come doubly hard at you to get it
back, so that’s where the confidence was drawn from. I know we hadn’t won a
game on the trip and hadn’t started off properly, but we never start tours
amazingly well.”
“And you, personally, were confident?”
“That’s my nature,” he says. “There is no point in going into your shell and
walking around all negative. I knew it would be difficult;you had a champion
team, a bunch of legends from one to 11 who had been smacked 18 months
before that and I knew they would come out and box as hard as they can. You
get a boxer into the corner, a champion into the corner and he will come out
swinging doubly hard. That’s exactly what they did. They came out and got
600 and absolutely crucified us.”“What about Shane Warne?” I ask. “You are
friendly with him, you play with him at Hampshire, but I think we were all a
bit surprised that your relations were so openly hostile in Brisbane. Did
you expect that?”
“I didn’t expect it,” he admits, “but I liked it, because it got me going.”
“You thrive on conflict?” “Yeah, I like it.”“And so does Warne?” “Yeah, Warney
loves it.” “How much contact did you have with him before the first Test?”
“Just normal,” he says, “but I knew things were different.”
“How?” “He was calling me by my full name; he was calling me Kevin; he wasn’t
calling me KP or PK as he normally does. I’d see him in the lobby or the
dressing room or whatever and he would call me that in front of the team, in
front of the other Australians. It was the start of the psychological
warfare, but it probably made me play better. I enjoyed it, it was great; it
was a battle.”
“What do you remember of the initial flare-up?” I ask.
“Swear words, aggression — Shane got more aggression than you got [at the
toaster],” he says and laughs. “Loads of things just boiled up. He had
thrown the ball at me in the first innings and I had brushed it off, but
that [the second time] was clearly chucking the ball at me, because I hadn’t
moved; I had tried to push it for one to mid-off and was in my ground, and
that’s where it just . . . the red mist just triggered and I let him have
it.”
“How long did it last?” “A while. We chatted about it for two hours the other
day.”
“Where?” “I was at home. He rang me to find out how I was and we chatted for
about two hours about life and relationships and stuff; it was really good.
We mended the feud.”
“What did he say about the Ashes?”
“Just fairly simple stuff, the ins and outs . . . I love listening to great
people, because I want to be great one day. Speaking to Shane and picking
his brain about what went wrong and how we played was good, because I can
take it in and speak to the boys about it. The bloke is great. He is every
good thing you can say about someone who can perform in sport.”
“Okay, take me back to the series,” I demand. “You lost Brisbane. Was that a
wake-up call?”
“A big-time wake-up call,” he agrees. “It was like [the 2005 series] when we
got drilled at Lord’s. It was back to the drawing board. We tried to be
positive. We needed to make a consolidated effort to get a good score in the
first innings and take the fight to Australia, and we did. [Paul]
Collingwood batted well, but then we let them off the hook by letting them
get 500, and then it was just silly season. That lastmorning was mayhem,
carnage.”
“What about your dismissal that morning by Warne?” I ask. “What prompted you
to play that shot [he was bowled around his legs attempting a sweep]? The
suggestion was that you went for him.”
“No, it wasn’t a case of ‘I’m going to get you Shane’,” he explains. “We’re
mates. It was achallenge. He was trying to get me out, and the best way for
me to counter Shane is to score off him. He doesn’t like the slog sweep, he
doesn’t like the sweep, and that shot I just saw as a scoring opportunity.
“Looking back on it, I wish I didn’t play that shot and wish I had given
myself more time, but hindsight is always best sight. At the time I thought,
‘Justsweep it for one’, but unfortunately I missed it, and then . . . well,
we just went into our shells. Some boys tried to be aggressive and got out
and some boys were defensive and got out. We tried both avenues and it just
didn’t work, but that’s life, tough luck, there’s nothing you can do about
it.”
“How did it feel to walk?” “Horrible. I hate getting out. Idon’t mind if it’s
for nought or before I get to 10, but if I get to 30 or 40, that pisses me
off, because I’ve got myself in and I’m chucking something away.”
“I watched you leave the Adelaide changing room. You didn’t stay late.”
“I don’t stay late after Test matches.”
“Some of your teammates did?”“Yeah, some of the boys love drinking, but I’m
not a huge drinker. They [Australia] won and I went and had a drink with
them, but it was their time to celebrate.”
“You weren’t in good form leaving the dressing room?”
“No.” “You walked straight past a bunch of kids waiting for autographs?”
“Yeah, I was just . . . losing that Test match was one of the lowest points of
my England career. If we had bowled well in that first innings and done some
things right, we would have won. It would have been 1-1 going to Perth and
the series would have been totally different. I sat there [in the changing
room] and thought, ‘Is this for real? How have we done what we have done?’ I
wasn’t in a good mood for three or four days.”
“Allow me to quote you something that Mike Atherton wrote at the weekend,” I
say. “ ‘In Adelaide the team spirit was broken and they have been
unravelling ever since’.”
“Yeah, a fair assessment,” he says. “I did a piece for the News of the World
with Richie Benaud afterwards and we both agreed that morning broke the back
of it. Hard, very hard.”
“So how do you repair it?” “You try to forget,” he says, “you try to get
yourself up. We had a week and a half before the next Test match and I
thought that was long enough to forget and regroup. We started off okay.
Monty got five-for; we thought, ‘Oh, we can have a go here’, but we didn’t
bat well first innings and then you’ve got this freak who comes in at seven
for Australia and he scores a hundred off fifty balls and it’s like, ‘Where
do we go from here?’”
“Adam Gilchrist?” “Yeah.” “And that’s another kick in the balls?”
“Massive. Then, once you’ve lost the Ashes, you are just playing for pride,
but it’s hard psychologically, especially against that team who . . . it
didn’t matter that they were beating you 3-0, they wanted to destroy us. And
they did.”
“So what’s your overall assessment of what went wrong?”
“I’m not going to nail any individual,” he says. “People have bad series,
people lose confidence — that’s sport, that’s life. If you are going to win
a Test series, your batters have to score big hundreds and your bowlers have
to bowl in the right areas totake wickets, and unfortunately we didn’t do
that.”
“Why? Complacency?” “No, not complacency, not at all. We knew we were
challenging the best team in the world. We were missing some key players.
Michael Vaughan, Simon Jones and Marcus Trescothick, three huge players for
us. And we lacked intensity as well. We were too nice. You did not seeany
Australians smile or even think about smiling at an English bloke, yet some
of our players were smiling. It’s something you don’t do, because once
they’ve got you, they’ll have you, and on the cricket field they will kick
you when you are down. We lacked that intensity.”
Jo arrives with coffee and biscuits to check on our progress. Confession: I
want to kiss her. And I want to hug KP. I’m thinking, “If only it was like
this every week”.
“Talk to me about Fred [Andrew Flintoff],” I ask.
“What do you want to know?” he says.
“How tough was it on him?” “It’s a real hard trip. The Australians target the
captain; they think that if you break the captain, you break the team. I
thought it would be different because Fred is such a good player and they
respect Fred because of how good he is, but they definitely got hold of him
and I think it probably played a big part in his series.”
“They broke him?” I suggest. “I think, ermmm . . . [he pauses, mindful perhaps
of the massive headlines if he chooses the wrong words] . . . I don’t know,
it’s hard to say, because of the respect I know they have for him. They do
fear him as a bowler and they do fear him as a batter and he showed glimpses
of it [his best form]. I just wonder whether the burden of captaincy
hindered his performances.”
“You’re in a pretty good place to judge,” I suggest. “Did it seem like a
burden?”
“He didn’t show it, he wasn’t different, but there were little things that
maybe hindered his performance. I’m a free-flowing player; I don’t have to
worry about much, just scoring runs, but when you’re standing at the back of
your mark and you’ve got to bowl at 90mph and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I should
have my first slip a bit wider’, it hinders your thought patterns, and it’s
a tough job, especially if you have Australia on your back.”
“So are England a better team without Fred as captain?”
“I don’t know; you never know how a person is going to go in Australia,
there’s just so much pressure. Two blokes were in the running for the
captaincy; Fred got it and didn’t have a great series. Straussy [Andrew
Strauss] didn’t get it and he didn’t have a great series, so it’s hard. The
management and selectors make decisions and you just back their decisions
because . . . it’s like the other day I was asked about Fletch [Duncan
Fletcher]. ‘Do you think he is this? Do you think he is that?’
“And I said, ‘Listen, I had a meeting with Fletch before the Australian series
and I batted the best I have batted’. He’s a great coach. I respect the man.
He has been around a lot longer and done a lot more in his career than I
have.”
The interview is drawing to a close. He finishes his coffee andglances out of
the window at his empty theatre of dreams: September 12, 2005, the day that
changed his life. If he closes his eyes he can still hear the cheers.
“What if that was as good as it gets?” I ask.
“Hmmmm . . . then it is, tough luck,” he replies, “but I don’t believe
it will be. There’s records to break, runs to be scored, World Cups to win
and more
