KP: Ordinary, oafish and over

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TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

WHAT has cricket done to deserve the cartoon character’s psyche trapped in the footballer’s ego trapped in too much talent for his own good that is Kevin bloody Pietersen?

As a South African, I am relieved he left our country. If he had not chosen to go, we should have deported him.

Had Pietersen stayed, he would have a far more difficult time being him than he says he has. Either his arrogance would have denied him a significant international career or he would have spent most of that career with the medics because he would have kept being punched in the face – by his teammates.

Room for outsized personalities is limited in South Africa’s dressingroom, and Graeme Smith, Mark Boucher and Jacques Kallis owned all of it in the era that spawned Pietersen, who could not compete with any of those giants as a player.

Which means all he would have had left would have been his mouth. That is, until someone closed it for him. And there would have been a queue of volunteers to do exactly that.

So, it is a good thing for all concerned that Pietersen moved to a place where enough people are too uptight to directly confront who and what irks them to allow the aggressively inept to survive and prosper.

For a while there, Pietersen had a career. For a while there, England had a gun cricketer.

But not for long enough to ensure that what Pietersen accomplished on the field would cancel out the trouble he caused in the dressingroom, on social media and now in the autobiography that has hit the bookstands with all the class and grace of a seagull obliterating itself on a cliff face.

Note to the publishers: please do not send me a review copy. Life is too short to be fussy about toilet paper, but every rule has its exception.

Is Pietersen worth the bother? Of course not, and if he had played for anyone but England the truth of that light would have outshone anything else about him.

Can it be an accident that so many of those he has publicly fallen out with – Andrew Strauss, Matt Prior and Andy Flower, for a start – are from the continent that is not for sissies and that Pietersen thought he was leaving behind?

If Pietersen reckoned that by faking Englishness he could hide a deficiency in toughness behind a clumsily manufactured rebelliousness that would have caused him to fail in Africa, he was wrong: there were more than enough Africans in England’s dressingroom to see through him.

Not that the English should be afforded a shred of sympathy for their filthy habit of signing up anyone and everyone able to get the job done better than their own.

Pietersen and English cricket deserve each other in the same way that drunks deserve hangovers. The difference is most hangovers are gone by the next afternoon. If only world cricket could rid itself of Pietersen so neatly.

Instead, he returns like a bad smell from a dark drain, ready, willing and oh so able to stink up the place again and again and again; just add nausea.

Pietersen and his supporters would have us believe that he is brave, misunderstood, original and valuable. The problem with that argument is that those qualities are to be found in most of us to some level and in various avenues.

Which means Pietersen is more ordinary than he is extraordinary. He sticks out most not for being different but for being difficult to a degree that negates his undoubted strengths.

As his Twitter profile picture on Monday, Pietersen used a photograph of a printed text presumably taken from the book’s jacket. Do not be fooled by the eloquence: the excellent David Walsh, whose dogged journalism exposed Lance Armstrong as a drug cheat, is Pietersen’s ghost writer:

“In the end, when we didn’t have success as a distraction they needed a scapegoat. Preferably someone big, boisterous and annoying. Somebody with a little history. Somebody who left footprints on the pristine white carpets. I didn’t always tread wisely. I was often naive and sometimes stupid. I was no villain, though. All I ask is that you read it. Then you can judge.”

Having been talking about Kevin all these years now he wants us to read hundreds of pages about him? And only his side of the story, no less.

Too late, we cry. Pietersen made us judge him a long time ago. Nothing he has said or done since has changed the perception he has created of himself as an oafish brat at the centre of his own universe.

Earth to KP: shut up and go away.