KP - Portrait of a Rebel - The Biography of Kevin Pietersen by Stead Marcus

Author:Stead, Marcus [Stead, Marcus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782196938
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2013-07-24T23:00:00+00:00

12

BEING THE BEST

Setting targets had become something that Kevin found useful in each stage of his cricketing career. It helped to sharpen his focus and to give him a clear sense of what he was trying to achieve every time he took to the field, for both himself and his team. Usually, he kept these targets to himself, or at most told those closest to him. But at the start of the summer of 2006 he openly declared in his News of the World column that he wanted to be the best batsman in the world. It was as simple as that.

The summer began with a three-Test series against Sri Lanka, which presented Kevin with what he considered to be one of the most daunting challenges a cricketer could face – the bowling of one Muttiah Muralitharan. Whenever Kevin had faced spin bowlers in the past, no matter how good, he worked on the principle that he should watch the ball right from the start of the run up, through the delivery, through the air until it reaches his bat. This approach worked fine with every bowler, including true greats like Shane Warne. In Murali, he had found someone with whom this rule didn’t always work.

Here was a man who was almost double-jointed, and Kevin could watch the ball as much as he wanted but it was Murali’s wrist that did everything. Murali’s action was controversial for years. There were those who thought he was a ‘chucker’, but like it or not, his action had long before been declared legal and people had to accept and respect him for the great cricketer he was.

Kevin had decided that he could only pick Murali occasionally, but not nearly as often as with other spin bowlers. He thought he had to pick Murali through the air, as it would be impossible to do so just out of his hand. His strategy was to play a lot more for the ball that turned away, rather than the one that came back at him. He knew that if he picked it wrong and the ball moved into him, he would be able to react because of his leg-sided dominance. This way, if he missed, the ball would hit his pads and he would probably be OK. He thought that regularly playing for the ball that turns away from the right-hander, the doosra, gave him a very good chance of hitting every Murali delivery. However, if the ball then turned into him, as in conventional off-spin, his shape and posture meant that he would be in the right place to hit the ball anyway, even if he’d misread the delivery. To be clear on his approach to such an unusual but brilliant bowler was vital if he was going to put in big scores in the upcoming series.

The one thing Kevin understood perfectly well was that facing Murali was not going to be a bit like facing Shane the previous summer. Yes, Shane was a wrist-spinner who bowled leg-spin, but there weren’t nearly as many variations as there were with Murali.

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