This and That: Strauss makes a dry roasted mess of the KP situation

I must admit that I don’t follow cricket on a week to week (or should that be wicket to wicket?) basis, but I want to speak briefly about the Kevin Pietersen situation.


England’s new Director of Cricket, Andrew Strauss, announced yesterday that Pietersen would not be selected for any of the upcoming summer tests. For all intents and purposes, Pietersen’s England career is over.

This is all despite Pietersen turning down a lucrative deal with the IPL and playing in domestic county cricket with Surrey, in hopes of earning a call up. This also despite Pietersen having a pretty good stab at doing that as well.

Despite all this hard work and the desire that he had shown, Pietersen was called into a meeting on Monday night and was given the axe. The main reason for his being dropped? A “lack of trust”, which is up there with David Moyes deciding a youth team player has “attitude problems” when he wanted to justify not playing a Shane Duffy or Ross Barkley.

I wonder how many other England cricketers will fall by the wayside to this hackneyed and downright bush league excuse when Strauss decides he needs a handy excuse to drop someone.

Because let’s not beat around the bush here. Pietersen was dropped because Strauss has a personal gripe with him. This is ultimately the only reason he will no longer play for England. Pietersen was offered to oversee the one day team in a consulting capacity. Why would you offer such a position to someone if you had trust issues with them?

Answer: You wouldn’t

What Andrew Strauss has done with his very first act in his new role is show that he isn’t cut out for the job. I’m pretty sure England would lose The Ashes with or without Pietersen in all honesty, but that’s beside the point.

This wasn’t a test of whether Strauss could win The Ashes; but rather it was a test of whether he was capable of putting his own personal feelings and bias to one side for the good of the National Team. He has failed that spectacularly with this decision.

Regardless of whether England were to win The Ashes or not, it’s almost certain that they’d have a better chance of winning them with Pietersen than without. Andrew Strauss should concern himself with picking the best team possible. He has failed to do that by omitting Pietersen.

All this ultimately means is that when England crash in defeat to The Aussies, which they probably were always going to, England and Pietersen supporters will have an extra stick upon which to beat Strauss with.

If he had picked Pietersen, supporters could have comforted themselves with the idea that he picked the best side possible and it would have bought him sometime. As he hasn’t, it will be open season on Strauss following the likely defeat.

He has no one but himself to blame.

Peace Out