So much has been made over the past few days of the “rifts” in the England dressing room that one might think the next appointment for the ECB would have to be that of the post of structural engineer.

Funnily enough, this is one of the few areas not yet covered in the generic area of “backroom staff”.

The truth, prosaic though it is, is that there have always been differences in a dressing room and that one of the great challenges for a captain or coach is to overcome such differences and meld a team into as cohesive a unit as possible. You then get the chicken and egg question: does team spirit lead to winning or does winning generate team spirit?

Sorry about this, but the answer is a bit of both. Creating a harmonious and inspirational environment will indeed heighten a team’s chances of success, so good leadership is imperative, but the end result inevitably affects morale in that same room.

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BACKGROUND

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• Miller was unaware of problems

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Multimedia

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• Video: Pietersen's press conference

Times Archive, 1974: Boycott walks out

To an uncommon degree, Boycott is a man driven by personal ambition. This being so he finds it more difficult than most to accept a subordinate position

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The Pietersen captaincy showed this in the space of a few months in microcosm, with the Oval Test match against South Africa last September being a winning start for KP in every sense, seen as a sort of love-in with smiles and hugs every 30 seconds. Then, at the end of it all, with a series of defeats in India now part of the equation, what seems to have become clear is that they did not like him much in the dressing room after all.

Dealing with a Pietersen-type character is never going to be entirely straightforward. There are immense up sides to having such a man in your team; when you have the combination of his enormous talent and a similar determination to succeed you have a genuine superstar and natural match winner, a valuable asset. But the chances are he is going to do things differently to everyone else and that his way of doing things might not gel with the lesser mortals. There have been variations on this theme ever since the game began. W G Grace became a legend on the back of some extraordinarily pompous behaviour — even KP has yet to tell the umpire that he cannot give him out because the crowd has come to see him bat.

Brian Lara, another for whom the term brilliant hardly suffices, spent half his career being simultaneously lauded for his talent and berated for his attitude — the stardom got to him, so his critics said.

On that I feel you have to give such men leeway. Their behaviour will never satisfy the purists, the believers in absolute role models, and there are far more outrageous characters out there in other sports and other fields living extraordinary lives. Such characteristics might not suit the rest of us but it’s normally fun to read about and gives us the opportunity to harrumph a lot while muttering about “appalling behaviour”.

Let us not forget that in Pietersen’s case here is a man, ambitious and driven as he is, who works exceptionally hard at his game. Lara might have liked a party or two and the trappings of his success but he was still making hundreds at the end of his career when all around him were flunking badly. Let me bring in Ian Botham, still the best allrounder we have had since the Second World War, yet a man who took allrounder status to new territories, extending the “work hard, play hard” mantra way beyond the usual boundaries.

Of my era he was the man you most wanted to have in your side yet also the man for whom you had to make the most accommodations. He could be the archetypal team man but then find that in effect his life took over.

To explain that, let me use the example of the 1986-7 Ashes tour when he began by sharing a room with an England rookie, Phil DeFreitas, and was happy to show him the ropes (most of them were ropes that Phil had never even heard of, let alone seen!). But soon after, Botham had retreated to what he called The Bat Cave, the private suite where he could hide from media intrusion. Beefy was of course a tabloid’s dream in any part of the world, partly of his own making, but by the time his reputation was established he was always going to be good copy and his life was inevitably different from that of the rest of us.

It meant that, for instance, in the West Indies in 1986, I as captain felt I could treat him differently from the rest of the squad. One of my beliefs is that you have at least to try to treat each individual differently within a broad team framework. This worked for some and not for others.

Referring back to the team spirit equation, what I found in the West Indies was that when the team started to get hammered (on the field) and Ian was himself having a bit of a shocker, that leeway I gave him to be himself became a problem for the rest of the team and thus for me. The time had arrived to have a word. As ever as captain, one has to remain adaptable.

Likewise with Pietersen, Andrew Strauss (who was my choice for captain before the Ashes of 2006-7 so I am glad he has finally got the appointment I felt he deserved before) has to judge very carefully how he treats his star. The encouraging news is that Pietersen has a good record responding to either a challenge or adversity and is more than likely going to make a stack of runs in the Caribbean. Although he will have been chastened by the lack of support over the past few days, he needs to maintain his self belief. This is the element that makes him as good as he is. The one thing that KP must not do now, though, is fall into the IPL trap.

Rumour, it may well be no more, suggests that he is contemplating a full stint in the IPL at the expense of the England team’s early-season commitments. If he were to succumb to that temptation, it would lose him all respect and should indeed cost him his place in the team, Ashes series or no Ashes series.