Kevin Pietersen easily makes the list of England’s all time greatest batsmen, his talent and skill with the bat in his hand are unquestioned, but what has turned out to be a deal breaker for him, has been his attitude & responsibility towards his team & his team mates .Quite often he has been accused of breaking the harmony in the dressing room, getting involved in altercations with his team mates as well as the support staff, which truly does not go down well with the player of his class.
As a result of all of this he finds himself fit and ready to play for England yet being literally discarded for selection in the national team and as far as ECB’s new director Andrew Strauss is concerned ,the future does not look too bright for him either .But if we put all of the KP’s antics on the back seat and think purely from the cricketing perspective, it is a no-brainer that KP walks into the current English side. And looking at the current state of the English batting line up,especially in the shorter format of the game where they seem to be almost a decade behind the other top teams, a personnel like KP, with all his swagger and aggressive intent would do no harm. Alastair Cook, the current captain of the England test team, is believed to be strongly opposed to KP’s return, who attacked him last year in his autobiography. KP was earlier told to remain committed to a county and score runs in order to remain in contention for selection into the national side, did the same and scored a magnificent triple century in his last county game after which he was snubbed by the ECB.
In the past there have been instances where people with indifferent attitude have been a part of a successful team and have also managed a very successful career for them, only because they were managed properly by the right personnel, one quick example is that of Andrew Symonds, who was quite often in the news for wrong reasons. The ECB needs to think in terms of cricketing quality that comes with KP, if they want English Cricket to be at par with the current top cricketing nations else its going to be another decade or so for England to be a power to reckon with in the shorter format of the game.