On Pietersen by Simon Wilde

Author:Simon Wilde [Wilde, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471138201
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

6

PIETERSEN AND LEFT-ARM SPIN

IT WAS during his post-captaincy malaise that Pietersen experienced the worst technical crisis of his career, perhaps the only serious technical crisis of his career. The Achilles injury that cut short his involvement in the Ashes series of 2009, and the troubles he experienced with the short ball in South Africa the following winter, were minor hiccoughs compared to what subsequently happened in Bangladesh early in 2010. There, what previously had been a little local difficulty against orthodox left-arm spinners – orthodox left-arm spin, for heaven’s sake, wasn’t that what Phil Tufnell had bowled? – became something much bigger, to the point where Pietersen seriously doubted himself for perhaps the one and only time. By his own admission, at one point he despaired of a solution.

At heart it was a technical problem, but it is a moot point whether it would have turned into such a full-blown crisis had it come at a different juncture of his career. Would it have happened, for instance, before his time as England captain? The post-captaincy Pietersen was a brooding, ultra-sensitive figure. Would the earlier Pietersen, swaggeringly magnificent and contemptuous of the notion that any bowler might contain him, have been so readily disarmed? It is true that Yuvraj Singh, himself a bristlingly powerful batsman, had already caused Pietersen some embarrassment with his occasional left-armers, but this was mainly in one-day cricket and was chiefly viewed as a pantomime diversion.

That Pietersen’s problems occurred against Bangladesh, a team with no meaningful history as a Test match nation and no superstars, was of course relevant. Had it been Australia, he would have been in preparation-mode for weeks, if not months. Had he been about to face menacing fast bowlers, or Shane Warne’s devilry, he would have left nothing to chance. But Bangladesh? Well, it seemed as though they were right down there with those coaches he didn’t rate: they just didn’t merit his attention, or his respect. And so the Lilliputians rose up and surprised their visiting Gulliver.

Pietersen, of course, was good enough to find an answer. But before producing conclusive proof of his genius by excoriating India’s spin attack on the red soil of Mumbai in November 2012, the search for a solution took him on a rare journey that required him to admit that there was indeed an issue to be addressed. He had to concede his own fallibility. For a man who believed in the all-conquering power of confidence, and had wrapped himself in a cloak of self-belief all his adult life, this was quite a step to take. Not that he liked to admit it to the wider world. Once he thought the problem was solved, he was keen to pretend it had never existed. Reports of his difficulties against left-arm spin were, he suggested, unfair or exaggerated.

Speaking about his great innings of 186 in Mumbai in an interview with All Out Cricket in January 2014, he perhaps unwittingly alluded to the crucial ingredient in that performance: ‘I play with such a carefree attitude that I’m not really fazed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.