KP's record is dizzyingly fine, the last of the high-water-mark 2005 Ashes team still playing in all formats of the game
This week I went to the kind of sporting sub?event that puts you in mind, rather uneasily, of the old joke about being the type of person who turns up to the opening of an envelope, or the launch of a rubber dinghy, or the unfoiling of a Pot Noodle.
In this case it was the unveiling of a shirt: not just any shirt, but the one Kevin Pietersen will wear for his new IPL franchise, the Delhi Daredevils. The shirt's coming-out was staged at the ICC cricket academy in Dubai and was a spectacle that, it must be said, required a certain amount of politicking to witness. Initially English press were banned from attending. This shirt launch was simply too big, too thickly caked in event-glamour.
Then a twist: English journalists could attend, but they must not ask questions. They may look upon the shirt, but only in the role of penitent mutes, struck dumb by its splendour. And so it was that after a tantalising delay, flanked by a cartel of grinning bigwigs, Pietersen finally appeared decked out in full Daredevils get-up, as ever surprisingly tall and lean and tanned and goofily charismatic.
We'd come not to bury KP, but perhaps to smile a little and to draw arch analogies between his recent travails in 50-over cricket and this knee?trembling Twenty20 canonisation. But as he ran through his lines, doing really rather well, name-checking the right people, posing for a photo with all four attendant bigwigs clutching at a single corner of the shirt, as though it were some holy healing shroud, it was hard not to soften and feel a little proud of this most peculiar cricketing personage.
This is the thing about Pietersen. You may think you have the measure of him, but for all his enduring celebrity-ism he remains both appealing and surprisingly persistent. It is perhaps only when he is finally gone that we may feel he has been slightly underrated, rather than, as many would suggest, the opposite.
Naturally, none of the attendant shirt-launch shenanigans were actually Pietersen's fault. He is simply the product here, retailed aggressively by his time-share owners. Plus, he fits this world so well it is tempting to imagine he harbours ambitions of becoming soon a facsimile of Chris Gayle, the world's most post-modern cricketer, who has basically pared himself down into a hired global six-hitting machine: just dial the 24-hour emergency number and Gayle will emerge from the nearest disco carrying his baseball bat.
But we know Pietersen better than this by now. The fact is, he hasn't disappeared from view, hasn't shied from difficult times in 50-over cricket, but has instead embraced his reinvention as an opening batsman at precisely the moment in his career he seems least equipped for its demands.
Many have remarked on the technical flaw in a defence that sees him present his bat with a dramatic swish from the right, like a matador brandishing his cloak. And there is something epically poignant about Pietersen being humbled by the forward defensive, this telescopicallyassembled uber-athlete with his nylon warrior's gait, baffled by cricket's ancient first position, like Tarzan starving to death because he just can't hold his knife and fork properly.
Some see this as symptomatic of a fatal flaw, a hubristic failure to refine and adapt his kung-fu forward lunge. Some will say he has always had a flawed technique, relying instead on those astronaut's reflexes. But this overlooks his fervent dedication to practice. Frail, ungrooved techniques are for lazier players. Instead Pietersen is simply
at a time when he is suffering chronic uncertainty at the crease, induced by the brutal new world of UDRS with its unblinking pedant's eye for lbw.
It is a system that has on certain pitches made cricket into a game of lbw, turned pads into stumps and cricket into french-cricket, stumps and bails a backdrop to the real G-spot, the batsman's legs.
Pietersen has not yet rebuilt his batting to counter this assault on the shins. Will he be given time? Certainly there is no real pillow of enduring public affection to sustain him through the lean times. Instead, Pietersen is often viewed a bit like a piece of machinery bought in at great expense: when he doesn't work he seems suddenly useless, like a combine harvester with a broken axle. This is despite the fact that his career record is not just fine, but dizzyingly fine. In ODIs Pietersen has the highest batting average of any England player with more than 50 matches. He is England's greatest player yet in Twenty20. And only Ken Barrington and Wally Hammond have played as many Tests and had a higher batting average. Forget for a moment comparing attacks across the ages. Judged solely on his stats, Pietersen is England's greatest batsman of the modern age.
His value lies in intangibles, too. Few other sportsmen have provided such distinctive and memorable physicality: that bravura forearm-extension to meet the clouting cover drive, or the quick step and loft over midwicket he produced on Wednesday night off the bowling of Abdur Rehman.
Then there are the innings: the 158 at The Oval in 2005 will remain his most dizzying extreme, an innings of fearless skunk?haired dufus-genius. Since then there have been more rhythmic masterpieces ? and this is the lovely paradox about Pietersen. He may have been painted as brash and new world?ish, a twitching future?phile. But it is his Test match deeds that will endure.
Plus, he has the added lustre of having simply not gone away, the last of the high-water-mark 2005 England team still playing in all formats. For two years now he is supposed to have been on the wane, already engaged in the roadrunner years, that modern sporting phenomenon where from a distance it is clear you've already gone skittering out over the edge of the cliff, held up by nothing more than fame-momentum and celebrity ballast. But Pietersen is dogged as well as explosive, as all great sportsmen are. And beneath the excitingly zippered, multi?chevroned inanities of his latest act of shirt-shifting, this is still a truly great English cricketer.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/feb/17/kevin-pietersen-england-delhi-daredevils-ipl
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