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

When Kevin Pietersen was appointed England captain, it seemed to be an enormous gamble that was likely to end in tears. Nobody, though, could have predicted the speed with which his captaincy has imploded, nor the scale of the fallout. Barely five months into the job he has gone and taken the coach, Peter Moores, with him.

The departure of the two men and the appointment of Andrew Strauss in Pietersen’s place, announced in a statement last night, will raise questions about the competence of English cricket’s decision-makers.

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What a week. From a snippet about the coach’s future, dropped into a conversation with a national newspaper on New Year’s Eve by a disgruntled player, a story developed of a coach and captain with little or no professional relationship and a team divided.

The difficulties between Pietersen and Moores were common knowledge. They first surfaced last winter in New Zealand when Pietersen was one of a number of players who felt that Moores’s training methods were over the top and that he was “challenging” the senior players in a disruptive way. Before Pietersen accepted the captaincy, the two had clear-the-air talks, which resulted in Pietersen announcing that the two could work together and that they were now “singing from the same hymn sheet”.

One business leader I talked to at the time, however, described Pietersen as the type of captain who would be all right when things were going well, but likely to implode if things started to go wrong. And, in India, although certain aspects of the trip were a personal triumph for the captain, the team did not win a game, losing the one-day series 5-0 and the Test series 1-0. After India scored 387 to win the first Test in Madras (Chennai), the word got out that Pietersen felt short-changed by the tactical advice on offer. Hugh Morris, the managing director of the England team, was aware of the differences between the two and Pietersen was known to have discussed the matter with Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman.

Once the story gathered pace that Pietersen could not work with Moores, neither went out of his way to deny the rift or reaffirm the promises of co-operation that had accompanied Pietersen’s elevation to the top job. Moores said nothing, while Pietersen merely said that the situation was “unhealthy” and needed resolving quickly. Pietersen had, in effect, flexed his muscles, sure of his own power.

Pietersen’s mistake was to stay on holiday in South Africa instead of returning when the rift became public. By not coming home at the first opportunity, his attitude towards the captaincy was revealed as casual.

In his absence, Morris has spent the past few days canvassing the reaction of Pietersen’s team-mates. Most of the players like Moores and think that he is a decent and honourable man, but they have reservations that he is the right person to take them to the next level. As for Pietersen, he will now have learnt an expensive lesson: that the players do not always say to a captain’s face what they actually think.

And so the story moved again, this time against Pietersen. By the time the ECB’s executive board met by teleconference call on Tuesday evening, the mood had hardened against the England captain. While the directors came to view Moores’s position as untenable, because he had “lost” the dressing room, they were also determined not to allow a new, inexperienced and — let’s be honest — foreign captain to decide who the ECB should hire and fire. By the end of the meeting, the ECB was determined to sack both.

Then came the final, dramatic day. First, news spread that Pietersen had resigned. Technically, this was false: he did not resign in the morning, but his insistence that he could not lead the team under the present management was taken as a de facto resignation by his employers. The ECB had called Pietersen’s bluff. Pietersen now balked, and refused to carry out his threat to resign until later in the day.

News organisations carried stories of the departures of both men before backtracking, while the ECB denied all knowledge of any resignations. Then Strauss was seen at Lord’s with Geoff Miller, the national selector, and when news came of a 6pm press conference, the jigsaw was in place.

By the end of the day, England had a new captain and no head coach.Strauss could not be more different from Pietersen. The sadness is that he doesn’t have his predecessor’s intuitive brilliance. Pietersen, as a captain, was an outrageous gamble, but there had been signs that he might pull it off. Now, we shall never know.

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