Fallen from grace but brimming with talent, Pietersen redeemed himself in Mumbai last year and got back on the pedestal of greatness
James Cory-Wright18-Nov-2013DOOF! A full-blooded cover drive first ball up. Thirty thousand voices roar their approval as the scuffed cherry scuds over the rope at 60 mph. Then a deft cut, as sharp as the batsman’s number two crew cut. – four behind square. Harbhajan groans. Down the wicket to the next one. BIFF! Slapped over mid-wicket – inches from being a six. The wild crowd jump and holler and cheer in a hot wave of sound. Then another. SMACK! Back foot, carved clean through the covers. Four. He’s up and running alright. BOFF! Then a hop and a skip, neat feet forward and drives with sweet timing wide of mid-off. Six of his first nine scoring shots are fours. He’s got to his fifty in 63 balls.A little blue-helmeted figure in the middle of a vast dusty amphitheatre raising his bat handle, gripped down near the splice acknowledging each cricket-crazed corner of the Wankhede stadium in turn. Loving it. And they love him. The tall South African who does it all for his adopted England. Record breaker. Innovator. The Decimator. They love the way he tears it up in the IPL and now on the biggest stage of all. Big shots, new shots. They love his swagger. His dominion. They love KP. 110%. KP. Legend. And that’s just his fifty.It’s quite amazing how things go. England and Pietersen had come into this match under enormous pressure, having been walloped in the first Test by nine wickets; a match in which he had failed miserably with scores of 17 and two, out both times to the 26-year-old left-arm spinner Pragyan Ojha. This cricketing ignominy had merely added to the off-field pressure Pietersen was already under to tittle-tattle:
‘…although the five-star Tower accommodation is good enough for everyone else, including Mumbai’s greatest, Sachin Tendulkar, KP has paid for an upgrade for himself and wife Jessica to the even more luxurious Palace rooms that were refurbished to their former glory after the terrorist attack in 2008.’
But at least on the pitch things are looking up. Back to the action. After tea on day two, with a chanceless fifty under his belt, the 6′ 4″ KP is getting into his not insignificant stride; in this case a neat angled shot off pace bowler Zaheer Khan for his ninth four to bring up the 100 partnership with Captain Cook who is on 84 not out. England 171-2, in reply to India’s first innings 327 and both players perhaps heading towards equalling the England Test record of 22 centuries.However, despite the inclination to the positive, if either of these two had been dismissed at this point in the proceedings, on a strip turning as wickedly as this one, then the Indian total would have looked daunting. After all, Monty Panesar and Graeme Swann had taken nine Indian wickets the day before leaving Mahendra Singh Dhoni perhaps ruing his request for a turner from day one. But you could see the logic, especially in the case of England’s danger man, Kevin Pietersen, whose vulnerability to left-arm spin was his Achilles heel and maybe the key to the series. And it was precisely this weakness that had been exposed in the first Test – clean bowled twice by left-arm spinner Ojha which meant that, coming into the Mumbai Test, Pietersen had fallen an unlikely 25 times to this variety in Tests. Rarely has a cricketer attracted so much psychoanalysis or, for that matter, barely disguised equivocation: ‘Kevin Pietersen’s paranoia of left-arm spinners is destroying him,’ ran the Vic Marks headline in the , a latter-day Meursault whose lack of remorse or guilt confounds the judge at his trial?Certainly the questionable sincerity of his reintegration or any of the other regrets he may, or may not have had, about incidents in his career, such as being stripped of the England captaincy, put him in the existential frame; not to mention the insularity, and maybe even guilt, of his English paymasters and the press corps (less so the paying public) that also cast him in the role of perpetual outsider. But to be truly existential, Pietersen would need to exist in a godless universe and this is simply not the case. Cricket is full of gods! And perhaps deep down, despite his showbiz lifestyle, love of publicity, the website, tweeting, texting and tattoos – all the trappings of the thoroughly modern sportsman, perhaps what Kevin Pietersen has to say about himself, tells us that rather than being remembered for what he isn’t, ‘one of the greatest cricketers of all time’, he’d actually settle for being described for what he truly is: ‘A hell of a great cricketer’.
