Well, he can always come and play for us...

Pietersen, England, cricket, managing good people

There are tips from hugely successful West Indian and Australian cricket teams: pick the team, then, pick the captain. Get your best players out there, and play hard. However hard anyone in the management team thinks is reasonable, take it several notches higher into unreasonably hard territory. Play just that bit harder than the opposition, or just that little bit harder than the referee and umpires would like. The Aussies bashed us up this winter. Their captain told Anderson to “get to his mark and have his f*****g arm broke”. Our captain never looked like being fined a proportion of his match fee for anything similar. Is it about ethos and philosophy (nice to have) or winning (the sporting imperative, the only ultimate measure)?

There's two sides to the story (we keep being told) and we don't have all the changing room facts (we keep being told). There's two guys who have captained Pietersen making opposed statements. Michael Vaughan says that we should be managing our best player. Failure to do so is a failure to manage. He did so. Strauss says the rifts are unmanageable. Vaughan's point of view is borne out by the fact that he and his team did manage Pietersen, and got the best out of him. Strauss' assertion is undermined by the fact that he does not caveat his statements with changes in the game, in the England set up and dynamic, in the general environment. Claiming Pietersen is unmanageable is clearly wrong. He has been managed, and has managed to contribute to a winning side in the past.

Botham can't have been exactly easy, even before he hooked up with Gower for some double-trouble. Flintoff, charming, beguiling, brilliant, must have had any number of off-the-radar incidents for every late-night pedalo-jacking and 10 Downing Street planter with a puddle of sick lapping about the topiaried miniature bay tree trunks.

Without doubt, the general principle is to sacrifice the individual for the benefit of the team. This sits within the need to turn out a winning team. United, later, were bigger than Beckham, and there was a parting of the ways; United, earlier, accommodated Cantona and anything he got up to. The difference was that Beckham was a good player in a good team. When the differential is reduced, the impact of imposing ethos and philosophy over the practicalities is reduced as well. The best player is marginally better than the next best player. The player coming in off the bench does not affect the quality of the team.

In Pietersen's case, he is head and shoulders better than the next best bat. Without him, Bell is probably the one player opponents think “we need to get rid of this one quickly or we could be in trouble here” about. In terms of timing, Pietersen's been binned with Cook hopelessly out of form, Carberry not really looking like a long-term option as the other opening bat, a collapse-prone middle order, and Prior on the out-of-form naughty step with Cook. Cook has, previously, sorted out a dip in form, I don't whether Prior has a way back or whether he's been found out for good at international level.

It seems that, without doubt, there are problems associated with Pietersen. There's no reason to doubt Strauss' assertion that there were some issues. There is doubt that these were insurmountable. There are informed observers who take the view that Pietersen just does not get the politics, the changing room / management tensions, and simply goes about his business expecting everyone else to do the same.

The timing is odd, too. With a new team director coming in, and possibly other changes to the management team, wouldn't it make sense to wait for that appointment (unless it has already been decided but is as yet unannounced) to be made and take on board that person's ideas? A demoralised team, on the end of a proper thrashing, a comprehensive thrashing (tests / one day games / twenty-twenty), sees the manager fall on his sword, then sacks its best player. Branded as a rebuilding process, sending Pietersen into the wilderness isn't going to speed up the rebuild.