Good old Kevin Pietersen. How the media love him. While most of the England team have made notes in the margins of their "Media Training - what not to say" text books, the class rebel has ripped out the chapters entitled "Avoiding egg on your face" and "Awakening the Aussies".

Pietersen's call to "humiliate" Australia by knocking them out of the World Twenty20 backfired spectacularly, while his suggestion that sending them home would somehow serve as an act of revenge for the Ashes whitewash is simply mind-blowing. As if a three-hour smack-about victory could have erased the hurt felt by thousands of England fans, who endured two months of torture as those Australian vultures picked at every last England bone.

Pietersen's comments, though, do highlight a perennial problem for our top sports stars. Most are so wary of making even the slightest faux pas in the glare of the media spotlight that they resort to the blandest of platitudes. Defeats are greeted with the "no-one's more gutted than the boys," attempt at empathy and the obligatory focussing on the positives, all of which is desperately dull. Pietersen, while sensationalist and often wide of the mark, is at least prepared to say something controversial.

While I've stumbled across the particular phrase, why do coaches and captains insist on focussing on the positives? Shouldn't they look at the negatives and improve them? Working at your weaknesses - I think it's gone out of fashion: "Admit we've got weaknesses, focus on them? Whatever would the sports psychologists say?"

Let's have a month of interviews where the management have to say exactly what they think. "Our fielding was terrible; he couldn't hit the cut strip and our best batter played the worst shot I've seen in ages, all of which contributed to us coming a very distant second."

Then perhaps a month where players have to come up with a reverse psychology approach. "Hey, we're playing against mighty Australia today. We're 10-1 shots at best." Or, "They're the best in the world, we're ranked seventh; they shouldn't lose really should they? We're just going out to enjoy ourselves."

It doesn't mean our top players shouldn't work hard, train professionally or be as focussed on winning as they possibly can be, just that they lighten up on all this positive self-talk stuff. How predictable are the ghosted columns of our leading sportsmen in the national papers? I must have read three articles by England rugby players on the eve of their crunch World Cup match against South Africa about how they were going to step it up and play with passion, only to read their apologies two days later. Stop talking about it and start doing it.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with Ed Smith, my former Kent colleague and current captain of Middlesex. Having handed round the dressing room a double page spread on Usman Afzaal, who had just been picked for England and was describing how much it meant to him and how he'd look to play Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, we were of the opinion that should such a glorious fate ever befall us (England selection not the spread) we would decline to speak to the media other than to say "If I am fortunate enough to play 20 Tests for England I then might feel I have something of relevance to say. Until such a point I do not consider myself qualified."

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