The Kevin Pietersen-Paul Hayward Interview

My, there’s a lot to discuss! Kevin Pietersen has finally broken his silence and the fallout will be biblical in proportions. We haven’t seen the book yet – Tregaskis has tracked down a copy and will send over a review shortly – but for now let’s just discuss what’s currently in the public domain. There’s plenty to get our teeth into.

Over the days and weeks to come we’ll try and unpick exactly what all the new info means, both on the micro level of Pietersen’s own story and the macro of English cricket at large.

But we’ll start simply by analysing the interview with Paul Hayward in the Daily Telegraph last night.

What’s he saying which is new and how does it fit into the previously standard narrative? What’s of most significance and how will his enemies respond?

Summary

What’s remarkable is how closely his views align with everything people like us have been saying for months. Flower and the ECB had in it for him ever since losing the captaincy. He was brutally ostracised and became the victim of vicious double standards. The ECB systematically leaked to undermine him.

At times it almost sounds as if Pietersen reads The Full Toss, not to mention Dmitri, and our friends who comment here and at the Guardian.

But there’s much more than Pietersen himself to contemplate. He portrays Andy Flower as a vindictive bully and Matt Prior as a corrosive hypocrite. Team England and the ECB come across as a vipers’ nest of cliques, infighting, and a selfish politicking which verges on the corrupt.

What a surprise.

Substance and response

It would be staggering if Pietersen stated anything as fact which wasn’t true. He has too much at stake. The Telegraph, his publisher Little Brown, and his highly-regarded ghost David Walsh have attached their reputations and credibility to what he’s saying – and won’t print anything they’re not extremely confident about.

Of course, this is all only Pietersen’s side of the story and much of it may have looked very different from other perspectives. He may have omitted things which don’t serve his purposes.

Only now will we start hearing from the other interested parties. It will be fascinating to learn who is prepared to say what.

The ECB come across extremely badly, as does Flower, who remains their employee. It may get worse when the book comes out. I sincerely hope the negative publicity severely damages their organisation. They need to be confronted by reality, and mend their arrogant, lying, and corrupt ways

Context

Today’s article is not an extract from the book and contains no direct quotes from it. Rather, it’s an interview, and the material has been selected and ordered not by Pietersen himself but Paul Hayward, who has written every word outside the quote marks.

This has to be borne in mind when analysing what has or hasn’t been said – and in the choice (by Hayward and the Telegraph) to make ‘bowler-bullying’ the top line. It’s they, not Pietersen, who are making many of the principal assertions.

The interview is a huge scoop for the paper. Pietersen’s decision to grant few interviews to sports journalists (especially, the cricket press) has raised the temperature. The hacks who’ve missed out will be envious, and resentful towards Pietersen.

Would Paul Newman have written what he did yesterday if he’d a chance of getting an interview?

There is little in the way of detail or examples to illustrate the main claims against Flower, Prior, and the general team culture. We’ll need to wait for the book’s evidence, or lack of it, to make a considered judgment.

Tone

Pietersen’s critics will probably say that many of his remarks sound boastful and vain. So what? If you’d received the amount of flak he has, wouldn’t you want to defend yourself? And what relevance anyway does it have to his sacking?

I wish he’d not claimed that his main motive for getting back into the England team is to help younger players. Common sense suggests that’s unlikely to be true of anyone.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not in the mix somewhere. His critics will scoff at all his sugary references to “helping” others – but just ask Monty Panesar, or look at Broad and Anderson’s batting stances.

Sacking

As we suggested might happen, Pietersen doesn’t really know himself exactly why he was fired. “Why was I sacked? I’d love to know.”

All he was told he says, was “cricketing reasons. We’re not going to select you. Cricketing reasons. They could hide behind that, because if they’d tried to give any other reasons I would have sued them. I would have taken them to the cleaners.”

As most of us suspected, “the ECB wanted to hang me on past misdemeanours which have proved to be – as you read in my book – just ridiculous.”

Many of us always thought it strange that from Paul Downton’s perspective, England’s biggest worry after the Melbourne test was Pietersen, the series top-scorer.

Pietersen’s view is interesting:

“If I’m so disengaged and you’re watching just me in that Test match, why were you just watching me? I’d love to say: ‘Paul, why were you watching just me? Has somebody told you that something’s going on? Has somebody told you I’ve lost interest in playing cricket for England?’”

Culture

Pietersen alleges that England have acquired an international reputation for the ugliness of their ‘bowler is king’ culture. It will be interesting to see how the likes of James Anderson – who admitted calling an opponent a “fat fucking c***” – will contest this charge.

Matt Prior

The singling out of Prior is a surprise and will be subject to much speculation and scrutiny – especially the revelation that Pietersen lobbied for his expulsion from the team.

And how about this bombshell? What does it tell you about the dysfunctionality of the Team England mindset:

“[Prior] wanted to start a media campaign to stop me getting the vice-captaincy, because Shane Warne and Michael Vaughan were talking favourably about me being Alastair Cook’s deputy.

“That’s what I took him up on in January when I got sacked. I said: ‘I’ve just been rung by two players in Australia who’ve been told by somebody in the ECB that you tried to start a media campaign against me.’ Is that seriously the heart and soul of the dressing room? This big team player?”

Prior is portrayed as a vain and caustic bully, but also, reading between the lines, the de facto enforcer and team boss after Strauss retired. No wonder that Alastair Cook went to such lengths to protect him.

As Pietersen says:

“Alastair Cook isn’t the greatest speaker; Matt Prior was his sidekick who could talk the hind leg off a donkey. So he wanted him close to him. He wanted his vice-captain to do all his talking for him”.

It’s also clear – as long understood – that Pietersen fell out with Anderson and Broad, but he is now on reasonable terms with them both. Why did they fall out, and when? Did it pre-date KPGenius?

Captaincy

This blog has always argued that the key event in the Pietersen saga was not textgate, but losing the captaincy. From that point onwards, the ECB distrusted him, resented him, loathed him, and sought revenge.

According to Paul Hayward’s summary today: “Pietersen outlined his belief that he was marginalised and demonised in the England set-up from the moment he lost the captaincy”.

Andy Flower

We were recently scolded by a leading cricket broadcaster for asserting that Andy Flower “comes across as long on memory but short on forgiveness”. And now it’s clear that Pietersen held this very same view himself:

“[Flower] had it in for me since I tried to get rid of him as second in command. He collected stamps. It was stamp after stamp after stamp, until he thought: ‘I can get rid of him now, let’s get rid of him.’ ”

The “tried to get rid of him” is a throwaway reference to an important incident – long rumoured and now confirmed – which I hope he’ll explain properly in the book.

As expected, the toxic relationship between Pietersen and Flower appears to be the key to the whole business:

“I’ve been one of the only ones who’ve constantly through his reign as coach not said ‘how high?’ when he said ‘jump’. He built a regime, he didn’t build a team. I’ve told him this before. I told him during his coaching reign. I told him on numerous occasions: ‘You’re playing by fear here, you want guys to be scared of you. And Andy I’m not scared of you.’ And he hated it.”

“[The establishment] didn’t like to be questioned. Andy Flower didn’t like one of his soldiers to hammer him. He was the boss. He wanted me to fear him”.

Pietersen supporters will say their fallout was Flower’s fault. Pietersen critics will say it was his fault.

I want to know more of the specifics, and what exactly their disagreements were about, but here are a few early thoughts.

Flower was the coach, not a football-style manager – an important distinction. His job was to manage egos and help players perform, not boss people around. He should have welcomed players standing up for themselves. Pietersen had by all accounts an excellent relationship with Duncan Fletcher.

Players are rather more important than coaches. As Pietersen says:

“A player is what people go to grounds to watch. The paying public don’t go there to watch Andy Flower”.

Leaks

Bloggers like us are often taken to task by journalists, and supporters of the establishment, for claiming that the ECB systematically leak and brief against Pietersen. What does he say himself?

“They’re the ones that broke the confidentiality agreement [when Paul Downton, the new managing director, gave a radio interview about the fall-out], they’re the ones who constantly had leaks. And that’s how the organisation works.”

Quite a few of the tittle-tattle stories from the winter turn out to be true – such as the Sydney disagreement with Cook about fitness training. How did these tales travel from the supposed sanctity of the dressing room to the papers?

Textgate

Pietersen is not quoted directly on the content of the messages, but Hayward says:

“Pietersen insists that his error was not disagreeing with a South African description of Strauss as a “doos” – a mild insult in his native country”.

So…someone else called Strauss a doos and Pietersen didn’t disagree? Or to put it another way – Pietersen did *not* call Strauss a doos. Remember, he always denied making “derogatory” remarks about Strauss, but his critics preferred to ignore that.

But whatever he did or didn’t write in a text message pales in significance compared with his psychological state at the time.

“Mentally I was totally broken. I was crying in a room with Andy Flower during that Test match, saying, how the hell has it come to this? I was completely broken, absolutely finished, mentally shot”.

It is unacceptable not to take these words at face value. If any other England player spoke like this nowadays, he received an awful lot of sympathy.

Pietersen was suffering from a period of mental distress and turmoil, and the KPGenius allegations tipped his destabilised mind over the edge. A grown man, he was in tears.

How did Andrew Strauss, Andy Flower and the ECB respond? As a captain, coach, and employers with a duty-of-care towards a player who was clearly in distress, maybe suffering from burn-out, and showing possible signs of psychological malady? They publicly humiliated him, and suspended him, for sending a private text message (the contents of which were unknown to them).

Peter Moores

What’s said on this front begs many questions:

“He denies, meanwhile, ever issuing the ECB a him-or-me ultimatum when he was the captain and Moores the coach: ‘It was never a him or me scenario. I said to Giles Clarke, in Chennai, in the room: ‘Giles, please let me just go and bat. He can coach, no problem. Let me please just go and bat. I just cannot captain with this guy.’ Michael Vaughan couldn’t do it, Paul Collingwood couldn’t do it, but I’m the one who gets labelled with the big fall out with Moores.'”

This account – of the pivotal political event in his career – is slightly self-contradictory, but also different in some respects from the ‘standard’ version of the story. Let’s hope he explains properly in the book.

Why he’s doing this

Pietersenphobes will lambast him for writing the book and doing interviews in the first place. It’s easy ammunition for those who claim he’s obsessed by self-promotion and ego.

They should take a look at Amazon and see all the books by Alastair Cook, Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad, who haven’t even retired yet. Almost every significant player does a book – including Strauss and Vaughan – so why shouldn’t Pietersen?

Especially when you look at it from his point of view:

“There has been this incredible machine that’s worked against me. This tidal wave that’s worked against me. And I needed an opportunity to say: This is my story. It’s been the most incredible journey. I just needed to have this as my right of reply”.

And quite right too.

Maxie Allen