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time for kevin pietersen to get in touch with his swaggering former self
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a rough passage — perhaps the roughest he has encountered — awaits kevin pietersen over the next few days. the nature of his response will tell us much about the direction his game will take in the coming years: will his talent burn brightly when england need it most this week or will it sputter and flicker, almost anonymously, as it has for most of the tour to south africa? nowhere does hostility better than johannesburg’s “bullring”. before he even gets to the arena, a batsman must brave a long, downhill and enclosed tunnel, either side of which the most aggressive of the boers will hurl insult upon insult. it was here that merv hughes, the former australia fast bowler, had his equilibrium disturbed to such an extent that he became involved in an unseemly fracas with a spectator and the locals need no encouragement where pietersen is concerned. once negotiated, his eardrums ringing with the abuse generated by what graeme smith, the south africa captain, has called “the burden” of comments made about his homeland, pietersen must confront, as every test batsman must at some stage, that dread moment: a green-tinged pitch, an attack that has sensed in the past couple of games a clear weakness and the knowledge of the frailty of his form. that pietersen’s form is sketchy is not in doubt. there are a lot of moving parts to pietersen’s game, unlike, say, with jacques kallis, who might be standing for an artist’s portrait so still is he at the crease. at the moment, something is not quite in sync, so that his head is too far to the off side of the ball at the moment of impact, forcing him to play across the line more than even he, an essentially on-side player, would like. that is why he did not review his leg-before decision in the second innings in the third test in cape town: he knew he had played across a straight ball. south africa’s suspicion is that this happens more so when a fast bowler is operating, hence dale steyn’s first-ball bouncer in the first innings in cape town, followed by a full-length ball that pietersen scooped back to the bowler. once, pietersen would have had what batting coaches like to call “a firm base”, but on this occasion he played “on the move”. pace unnerves everyone; south africa feel it unnerves pietersen more than others. but the problem goes deeper than a mere technical glitch, which is commonplace to every batsman and which can be cured simply and swiftly. what is obvious is that something has changed within pietersen and that something has not simply been caused by the immediacy of south africa’s assault on his confidence. if diminished is too strong a word, then he seems separated, at least for now, from the certainties that accompanied his swagger to the crease in the early days of his international career when he had everything to prove and no expectations to live up to. but, hang on a moment: didn’t he average more than 40 in 2009 and are there not other england batsmen, such as andrew strauss, who have scored fewer runs than pietersen in this test series? it is true that most run-of-the-mill test batsmen would be happy with an average of 47.50 for the year, which was pietersen’s return in 2009. but pietersen has never regarded himself as run-of-the-mill; rather he has challenged observers to bracket him with a higher class of batsman, such as don bradman, sunil gavaskar and herbert sutcliffe, the only men to have scored more hundreds in their first 45 test matches than the 15 pietersen scored in his. his world ranking has slipped from no 3 in may 2007 to a lowly nineteenth now. how good does he want to be? this, then, is the pressing question pietersen ought to be asking himself in the build-up to this final test. now more than ever, because he is at that stage in life and sport that can be tricky. he is happily married, a soon-to-be father and has enough money to while away the rest of his life wondering how good he might have been. he is settled in a way that he was not when he burst on to the scene with a skunk haircut and a point to prove. he is done with all that “malarkey”, to use his own phrase, now. he is recovering from a serious injury, too, the type of thing that forces a sportsman to confront directly his sporting mortality and he might feel disgruntled that strauss has received the captaincy plaudits that he may believe were due to him. is there a lingering resentment at the way he was treated by his employers when all he was doing, in his estimation, when he “got rid” of peter moores, was putting the interests of the team ahead of his own? all these are the added complications, layer upon layer, of a career in the spotlight. the spotlight will be turned on him again when the fourth test starts tomorrow. the feeling, among those who have watched the span of pietersen’s england career, is that he likes it less than he did before. there were complaints — understandable, too — when a tabloid accused him, wrongly, of throwing beer over a south african spectator in cape town but when the paper’s journalist approached pietersen to apologise, the player talked of persecution. it is almost as if now, unlike before, pietersen wants to get on with things quietly and anonymously. but once you have embraced the cult of celebrity, it is not so easy to retreat. but how far does quiet anonymity suit his game? it was a game that, previously, was based on self-glorification, the “look at me aren’t i brilliant?” attitude that culminated in the kind of wondrous strokeplay that, this observer at least, had rarely seen. pietersen is not ian bell, nor should he try to be. somehow over the next five days, the brylcreem boy has got to find his inner skunk.
... and the road ahead is long
sol campbell will complete a remarkable return to arsenal today by signing a contract at the emirates stadium until the end of the season. the former england defender played in last night’s reserve-team match against west ham united at upton park and then revealed that talks about a permanent contract are already at an advanced stage. it was campbell’s first appearance in an arsenal shirt since may 2006 and he coped well before coming off at half-time.
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