Can England win the Ashes without you, KP? A question in a pre-Ashes press conference and Kevin Pietersen was all over it: he’s just one of the team, England are stuffed with great cricketers, his job is just to do his bit and if he can get some runs to help the team, then he’s deeply happy. It’s the team what matters, not the glory of Kevin Pietersen.

And all along, his eyes said: “Good question.”

This isn’t really a contradiction at all. The fact about Pietersen is that he is a team egomaniac. He puts his egomania at the service of the lads. And that’s why he played one of his more extraordinary innings — and the competition for that accolade is pretty intense — as he made the top score yesterday with 69 for England on a day of fraught and nerve-jangled cricket.

The thing about Pietersen is that he’s prepared to take on anyone and that doesn’t stop at Australia bowlers. He will also do battle with his own nature. Pietersen took on Brett Lee in that insane innings that secured England the Ashes four years ago; yesterday we saw Pietersen in a pitched battle against his own egomania.

The war in Pietersen’s breast is between his desire to show off on the day and his desire for sporting greatness that lasts for all time. He wants to be the flashiest, the prettiest, the most spectacular; he also wants to be remembered as one of the finest players that picked up a cricket bat.

This causes a clash. Part of Pietersen wants to play breezy cameos, to confront every bowler, to play shots that no one else in the world can pull off. He loves the style, the strut, the theatre. He wants to hear the cheers, he wants to reach every century with a six.

But that is only a part of Pietersen, and by no means the dominant one. He wants to make a century every time he goes out to bat and is well aware that Don Bradman and Sachin Tendulkar did not get their reputations by smashing every ball for six and showing a few party tricks. And it is in their company that Pietersen wishes to be found. He really has set his sights that high.

So out he came to bat on a wicket that was not exactly tailor-made for flamboyant batsmanship. His partner was Ravi Bopara, stoned blind on adrenalin. Pietersen is a naturally edgy starter, the chemistry between the two of them was potentially explosive.

They traded mad Red Bull singles and then Bopara started to smack the ball about as if he was England’s alpha bat, not Pietersen. But he got out and the match and Pietersen’s innings became ever so slightly surreal.

England, lunching at 97 for three, needed to dig back in, and so they dug, with Pietersen as chief digger. He and Paul Collingwood put on a hundred and prevented any possibility of a rout.

They did it with extraordinary circumspection. There was a period in which neither hit a boundary for 21 overs. Pietersen went 24 overs — count them — between fours. Meanwhile Nathan Hauritz sent down over after over of not terribly brilliant off spin and you kept waiting for Pietersen to smack him into the River Taff as a matter of principle. Except he didn’t.

It was as if Ricky Ponting, the Australia captain, had deliberately engineered this Pietersen v Pietersen battle. He was saying: “I bet you can’t resist. I bet you’ll chuck your wicket away in some daft crowd-pleaser of a shot. I bet you haven’t got the patience.” And Pietersen was replying: “Oh yes I have. I am so much more than what you think. I have depths that you lot can’t begin to plumb.”

And so, keeping himself on the choke-lead, he nudged and nurdled and singled and two-ed and sometimes even three-ed England away from calamity, into a position of respectability . . . slowly moving towards a position in which he would go into the phone box, emerge as Super-Kev and start jumping over tall buildings.

It never came. It seemed that the war within had been too hard, too attritional. Careworn Kev somehow missed the gear change. He had already had one bad moment when he gave Hauritz the charge and missed. He had survived a leg-before shout that looked really rather out.

Now to go on . . . but Pietersen missed his moment. He was out trying to go from second to top in a single shot. And what a shot, too: the sort that everyone adores when it works and everyone condemns when it fails.

It was Hauritz that got him, and that really adds to the pain. To be out to a great ball from a great bowler is one thing; Hauritz is not a foe worthy of Pietersen’s steel. Pietersen dropped to his knee for a premeditated sweep. Shall we give Hauritz the credit, say he saw Pietersen coming and bowled accordingly? He tossed it more or less straight at first slip, Pietersen somehow managed to reach it and got just enough bat on it to be caught. It looked dreadful.

It was not an innings to cherish and its end was unworthy and will be much vilified. A daft shot indeed. But all the same, this innings — this long, slow performance of anti-Pietersen — got England out of a hole and allowed them to reach a position from which anything is possible.

Pietersen’s great innings of 158 at the Brit Oval in 2005 came about when the England captain at the time, Michael Vaughan, told him to go out and play his natural game.

Yesterday, Pietersen did his best for his team by electing to play his unnatural game. And if there was something awkward about it — if Pietersen was at times almost a parody of reticence — then it was all about Pietersen’s determination to go for substance, not style; to go for greatness, not cuteness.

This is a rock’n’roll cricketer with ambitions to be Beethoven.