Kevin bloody Pietersen

The Cricketer - February 2014

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

Tattoos do strange things to people. Some they embolden with delusions of hipness. In others they encourage delinquency both juvenile and geriatric. Still others inscribe themselves with the name of a lover they could not forget if they tried. And how they have tried.

To Kevin Pietersen tattoos did something just as permanent but far more consequential. They turned him into an Englishman.

The transformation from strutting Saffer to poncy Pom took less than five years. It was complete by the time Pietersen opened his mouth on his return to the country of his birth in 2005 to play a one-day series.

The lazy language and anodyne accent peculiar to people from Pietermaritzburg, the KwaZulu-Natal town where Pietersen grew up, only just survived in what, to South African ears, was London cabbie-speak, littered with guttural stops and complete with “wot” and “innit”.

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

That is not Pietersen. It is Kafka, from The Metamorphosis. But it fitted Pietersen as snugly as his estuary Englishness.

Considering that in real terms not a lot had changed in Pietersen’s life, how had this happened? Although he had moved countries, continents and even hemispheres, he had simply segued from one deeply middle-class existence to another. Aside from the hot summers and tropical vegetation Pietermaritzburg, described by the author Tom Sharpe as “half the size of a New York cemetery and twice as dead”, can seem like another kind of England, right down to the colonial architecture, posh schools and Indian takeaways.

This is especially true for affluent South Africans like Pietersen and even more so for those who play colonial sport like cricket or rugby – still the games of choice at South Africa’s upper-crust schools, among them Pietersen’s Maritzburg College – and are liable to be fans of Manchester United rather than Mamelodi Sundowns. Norman Tebbit would not understand why but South Africans of other races do not object to this anomaly.

So what else, some South Africans thought, could have brought about Pietersen’s uncredible revolution but the Three Lions Rampant he had paid to have sunk into his left arm? It’s the tattoos wot done it, innit?

Pietersen often arrived sleeveless at press conferences on that tour. All the better to flaunt his inky indiscretion? His talk was filled with “us” and “them” and the sneers of someone who would not brook dissent from his received truth that England’s pastures were indeed greener in every way.

“Kevin sang ‘God Save the Queen’ at the top of his voice, word perfect and with more enthusiasm than many of his team-mates,” Marcus Stead wrote in KP: The Biography of a Rebel. “This meant a massive amount to him – he now felt like a full Englishman and believed he had been completely accepted as a member of the team ... [Jannie Pietersen] now knew his son was playing for the right country.”

South Africans like to think of Pietersen as a simple creature but could he be that simple? Perhaps Stead should have titled his book Going For a Song.

Robin Jackman is Pietersen’s mirror man in that he enjoyed an idyllic, happy childhood on an English farm before moving to South Africa. No one could accuse Jackman of being a rabid left-winger but his reality is refreshing.

“I stand for both national anthems whenever I hear them,” Jackman says. “I would like to think that Kevin does as well.”

Did he consider himself English or South African?

“I am English and will always remain so but I very much regard myself as a South African. I have made South Africa my permanent home and have embraced the country and all its traditions just as South Africa has embraced me.”

Pietersen is far from the first foreigner to play for England and Pakistanis have been capped by South Africa and Australia. Does nationality in sport still matter?

“Clive van Ryneveld played rugby for England and cricket for South Africa and nobody batted an eyelid, and that was a long time before Kepler Wessels played cricket for two different countries,” Jackman says.

“I think what does matter is that any individual has the right to explore opportunity if he cannot find that opportunity at home.

“The likes of Wessels, Tony Greig and Allan Lamb left because of isolation and therefore no opportunity to play international cricket. Kevin left because he believed he was not getting a fair opportunity – those were different circumstances but they involved a similar belief and he cannot be blamed for that.”

Nine years on from his debut winter Pietersen has twice returned to South Africa – both times as a far less prodigal son. He has also been less successful, scoring two half-centuries in 13 matches across all formats since 2005. That has helped people forgive him.

But in the summer of 2012, forgiveness from his adoptive compatriots became the over-riding theme of the series. South Africans who were in England during the Proteas’ tour in 2012 can attest to the hurt and anger that had seeped into public discourse about Pietersen’s treatment of the country that had taken him in and nurtured him to become the player he is.

How dare he try and dictate when and in what format he will play for England! How dare he put the Indian Premier League before representing what he calls his country! How dare he consider himself more special that other players!

As South Africans, we know how you feel. We were there, too, remember. And we are back there again, what with Jacques Kallis happy to put his ageing (in elite cricket terms) body through the eight and a half weeks of the 2013 IPL but not through the two and a half weeks it took to play the Champions Trophy. Perhaps we need to wise up and understand that professional cricket is just like any other game – played for money, not for love or national honour. When you drain away the context and are left only with Pietersen’s statistics and achievements, his career bears favourable comparison with any of the England greats who preceded him. It would be unfair to single him out for castigation in that light, though it does tend to happen, most recently during England’s calamitous Ashes tour, whenever the team fails to live up to its potential and KP’s shot selection leads to disaster rather than triumph.

Would Pietersen have bothered moving to England if the IPL had existed in 2000? Why put up with tattooists, talking funny and miserable weather if all you have to do to live high on the hog is play for an invention of the marketing departments of corporations owned by the bored mega-rich?

The answer, of course, is that Pietersen would be nothing without England. He was an unrecognised offspinner in South Africa. England unlocked him, fed his ego in a way only English newspapers can and allowed him his strut in a way that would not have been tolerated in countries like South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, where doing matters more than talking.

South Africans will never forgive themselves for failing to spot the talent. England was the making of Pietersen, and well done for that. But loyalty is not what drives him.

“I’ll retire when I can’t get up to play for England,” he said two days before the Boxing Day Test. “I’m as good as gold at the moment.”

With Pietersen “at the moment” could mean exactly that. If Graeme Swann, who seems so much more firmly rooted in the real world, can lose the plot and retire when his team needs him most, what is to stop Pietersen from taking his 8,000-plus Test runs and riding off into the sunset of his imaginary footballer’s life in Chelsea?

In that 2005 one-day series South Africans were under no illusion about the threat Pietersen posed on the field, hence their relentless booing and heckling of him. Part of his response was to reel off three centuries in five innings, each of them an emphatic example of aggressive batting in the face of extreme hostility from the crowds as well as the bowlers. They were exceptional performances, powered by emotion and fuelled by the belief that a wrong was being righted.

The rest of Pietersen’s reply to the double-barrelled onslaught was to take on the spectators who gave him stick, which of course earned him more angry attention.

An important part of the psychosis of the scenario is that most of his detractors would agree with Pietersen’s reasons for turning his back on South Africa. He has long peddled the story that he was forced to leave the country because of race quotas in cricket, when the suggestion that he was not then
good enough to be offered a contract by the KwaZulu-Natal Dolphins is at least as valid.

To those booing and heckling he was the one who got away, who had escaped what they considered the awful reality of being white in modern South Africa, what with affirmative action closing in on the middle-class life they once considered reserved for them. Like a dog returning to a captive pack after a night of freedom on the streets, Pietersen was sniffed all over and snapped at with extreme suspicion.

As Stead makes plain in his book merit selection is sacred to Pietersen. Nothing and no one, certainly not a bunch of grubby politicians, should interfere with it. Does Pietersen honestly believe his talent would have been discovered in the South Africa he grew up in had he not been born white and sent to an elite school, where he had the benefit of good coaching? Or that his father would have been able to provide for his family as well as he did if he had been denied, on racial grounds, the education that made him a civil engineer? Or that he would have been able to concentrate on becoming the best player he could be if his life was repeatedly interrupted by political and social upheaval? If all that does not interfere with merit selection, nothing does.

How much has South Africa lost in Pietersen? Plenty, as he suggested they would by scoring 152 in his first Test against them at Lord’s in 2008, followed by his hundred at The Oval in England’s consolation victory. Last August Pietersen’s audacious 149 brightened a Headingley Test that otherwise rivalled for dourness the Yorkshiremen watching it.

South Africa will be satisfied to have escaped with those three centuries and two defeats in the 10 Tests in which Pietersen has been part of the England teams they have played against.

How much have England gained in Pietersen? They have, following the 5-0 drubbing in Australia, won 42 of his 104 Tests and lost 31. Pietersen’s Ashes scorecard is 4-2 in England’s favour. Beyond the numbers he has added steel and swagger to England’s inbred anaemia, and played an integral part in what may yet be recalled as a golden era for their team. But Pietersen is just as capable of devastating thoughtlessness, such as when he disparaged his captain, Andrew Strauss, in text messages to South Africa’s players.

“It’s tough being me,” he said in the wake of that silliness. It is, KP, and you make it tougher still. But you chose this life and it’s been good to you. Tattoos are skin-deep but they are also forever.