by John Wisden
Of course, the man who became KP will dismiss such caution. He plays on because it makes him happy, because it’s important to him, because he really, truly believes he is English. The old pros and the awkward so-and-sos, they’ll never understand. It’s tough being Kevin.
Patrick Collins, five times winner of the Sports Writer of the Year award, is chief sports writer for the Mail on Sunday.
KEVIN PIETERSEN AND TWITTER
A beer with Barack
JARROD KIMBER
Whether Kevin Pietersen was texting in Afrikaans, saying sorry or having his genius mocked, it all seemed to end up on Twitter. This was strange, because his own tweets were not that exciting.
He warned Roman Abramovich, Chelsea FC’s oligarch owner, not to sell Frank Lampard: “Lamps shows who the boss is today. YOU DARE, Roman!” He congratulated his old mate Yuvraj Singh on his comeback after cancer: “@yuvsingh09 great stuff pie chucker… Be strong champ!!!! #yuvstrong”. And when Sachin Tendulkar retired from one-day cricket, he ventured the view that Tendulkar had been a pretty good player: “Statistics NEVER lie! They tell a very true story. Well done Sachin! What an incredible ODI career #thebest”.
But give Pietersen a smartphone and a way of conversing with the world, and you could hardly expect him to stay out of trouble all the time. “Can somebody please tell me how Nick Knight has worked his way into the commentary box for the Tests??” he fumed in May. “Ridiculous.” It felt odd for anyone to worry about Knight, who is more likely not to pass judgment on anything, and take his time doing it. But then Pietersen did not always appear to have thought things through: during the Indian Premier League, he would chat on Twitter to the league’s former commissioner Lalit Modi, who just happened to be mid-lawsuit with ECB chairman Giles Clarke – Pietersen’s boss.
Somehow it seemed appropriate that, even when he wasn’t on Twitter, he was – in a manner of speaking. The fake account @KevPietersen24 became a social-media sensation, claiming to speak directly from his ego. Many seemed happy to suspend disbelief, and the account was followed – and commented on – by England players. At one point Pietersen himself got involved in the fun, retweeting a doctored tweet which purported to show the US president Barack Obama suggesting a beer with the fake KP. In a strange summer no one dared rule out the possibility.
But the account began to annoy him, not least because he suspected team-mates had set it up. In fact, it had been started by a friend of Stuart Broad – and, to complicate matters, on an evening when Broad was with his friend, Richard Bailey, aka @Bailsthebadger. Broad was tweeting pictures of Bailey too. Bailey admitted: “Yes the parody was me. It was for humour purposes only and as soon as I realised it was upsetting people I took it down.”
Alas for Bailey – and the England dressing-room – Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Daily Mirror and a friend of Pietersen, would not let the matter lie. Having outed Bailey in the first place, Morgan tweeted: “Broad can collude with parody KP account, Swann can slag KP off in a book – no action taken. Total, shameful hypocrisy.”
It was one of many tweets from Morgan defending Pietersen that must have confused his followers in America, where he hosted a chat show on CNN. Thanks to Morgan – in his own mind, at least, which was all that mattered – and England’s desire to win in India, Pietersen returned to the fold. After the series was sealed at Nagpur, Matt Prior tweeted: “Love this! @kevinpp24 is so reintegrated he’s walking around with all our names on his shirt!” And if it was on Twitter, who could doubt it?
THE PIETERSEN SAGA
Excommunication and reintegration
May 31
Pietersen announces his retirement from all limited-overs international cricket with immediate effect, because of “the intensity of the international schedule”.
Jun 10
Pietersen suggests the ECB alter their central contracts to allow him to play Twenty20 while skipping one-day internationals.
Jul 13
After hitting 234* for Surrey at Guildford, Pietersen confirms negotiations are in progress for a possible return in all formats. But he adds: “I cannot keep playing every single day’s cricket. I’ve never been looked after.”
Jul 18
England omit Pietersen from their provisional squad of 30 for the World Twenty20.
Aug 4
Pietersen makes 149* on the third day of the Second Test at Headingley, pointedly raising his bat in the direction of his wife, Jessica, rather than his team-mates.
Aug 6
Appearing alone in the post-match press conference, Pietersen launches an extraordinary outburst. “I can’t give any assurances that the next Test won’t be my last,” he says. “I’d like to carry on, but there are obstacles. It’s tough being me playing for England.”
Aug 9
A parody Twitter account – @KevPietersen24 – which lampoons Pietersen’s personality, is closed down by its owner Richard Bailey, a club cricketer from Melton Mowbray and a friend of Stuart Broad and Alex Hales.
Aug 10
Pietersen is reported to have sent derogatory text messages about Andrew Strauss to South African players during the Headingley Test. South Africa’s tour manager Mohammad Moosajee insists the texts contained “friendly banter”. Matt Prior phones Pietersen to try to break the impasse.
Aug 11
Pietersen posts a video on YouTube unconditionally pledging himself to England in all forms of cricket, and retracting his demand to play a full season in the next IPL.
Aug 12
England delay their squad announcement for the Lord’s Test for five hours, then leave Pietersen out after he fails to deny the texts story.
Aug 14
Pietersen apologises to the ECB by email for what he terms “provocative texts”. Broad denies he is behind the parody Twitter account.
Aug 19
Pietersen plays his first match since Headingley, for Surrey against his former county Hampshire in the CB40 at Southampton. He is booed by sections of the crowd.
Aug 24
ESPN STAR Sports confirm they have signed Pietersen for a studio analysis role during the World Twenty20.
Aug 29
Strauss retires, maintaining the Pietersen saga has nothing to do with his decision.
Sep 7
The ECB award a new round of central contracts; Pietersen’s name is missing.
Sep 18
Pietersen is left out of England’s Test squad to tour India in November.
Oct 3
Pietersen appears alongside ECB chairman Giles Clarke at a press conference in Colombo, pledging himself to England, and signs a four-month central contract. Clarke says: “In our society we believe that, when an individual transgresses and then apologises, it is important that they should be given a real opportunity to be reintegrated into our society.”
Oct 7
In a radio interview, ECB chief executive David Collier says members of the South Africa team “provoked” Pietersen into sending the texts, prompting an angry response from Cricket South Africa. Eight days later, Collier apologises.
Oct 18
Pietersen, after meeting Andy Flower, Alastair Cook and other senior players in Oxford, is added to the Test squad for India.
Nov 19
England lose heavily in Ahmedabad – Pietersen makes 17 and 2 – but go on to win the series 2–1 after a swashbuckling 186 from Pietersen in the Second Test at Mumbai.
Jan 9
ECB announce Pietersen has signed a full central contract.
Research by James Coyne
TENDULKAR’S 100 HUNDREDS
The glory was in the number
SIMON BARNES
I would have preferred 99. I thought that was enough. But on March 16, 2012, Sachin Tendulkar reached his 100th international hundred, a century of centuries. And I think there would have been more elegance – perhaps, paradoxically, more sense of completion – if he had stopped before he got there.
He had collected 51 centuries in
Test cricket and another 49 in one-dayers, each an unprecedented figure on its own. When combined, they ask for a redefinition of such inadequate concepts as excellence. If you look long enough at a fine Islamic rug, you will eventually find the purposed error: the deliberate imperfection which shows that the humble artist had no thoughts of beating God at his own game; a humility concealing the arrogant thought that, without such a flaw, people might genuinely have mistaken the artist’s work for God’s.
A flaw humanises and, by doing so, reminds us that something great has been performed by someone just like us: a person who bleeds when pricked, sleeps in a bed at night, eats, digests and defecates. “Cricket is my religion, and Sachin is its God,” as the Indian cliché goes. The fact is that Tendulkar was born as we were and will die as we will ourselves. It’s harder for humans to do things in real life than it is for a god in a story. Shouldn’t we celebrate Tendulkar for his humanity, for what he achieved, despite the inevitable fallibility of humankind?
After all, Sir Donald Bradman left cricket on 99, not a hundred. Tendulkar and Bradman have long been twinned in one of sport’s impossible comparisons. Would Bradman have worn a helmet and played the Dilscoop had he been a 21st-century cricketer? Would Tendulkar have gourmandised in the manner of the Don? In a game obsessed with statistics like almost no other, Bradman has a Test average with a number that sings out to cricket followers like a line of poetry: 99.94. The poetry is all in the missing 0.06 – the six lost hundredths.
For a long while, it seemed as if Tendulkar’s ultimate stat would have the same sort of humanising fallibility, the not-quite-purposed flaw. For unending months, the figure of 99 overshadowed everything he did. He claimed he wasn’t thinking about it; certainly, he did all he could not to. But everyone else in India was mad on the subject. He couldn’t order a paratha on room service without the floor-boy asking when the 100th hundred was going to come.
India’s tour of England in 2011 was memorable for the hundred that never was. I could feel in my bones during that series – and I don’t think I was alone – that the 100th hundred would eventually come as a moment of supreme bathos. The situation demanded it. I even predicted it would be against Bangladesh or Zimbabwe. I didn’t, though I should have done, suggest it would come in a losing cause, as Bangladesh beat India by five wickets at Mirpur in the Asia Cup. The only glory of that day was in the number itself.
Which is not to say that numbers lack glory. Sport’s all-time great numbers include ten, for Pele. The figure 147 haunts snooker, to the extent that players will chase the maximum break at the expense of mere victory. Four, as in minutes and a mile, was a compelling number in athletics; similarly another type of ten, as in seconds and 100 metres. One is a magic number in golf, just as 100 is in cricket. Baseball has .400, for the batting average that has become extinct. These days, even the finest hitters average in the .300s (you get a baseball average by adding up the number of times the player hits the ball and safely reaches first base, then dividing by the number of at-bats).
The lost .400 average demonstrates one of sport’s eternal truths: that while the great players are always great, overall standards tend to rise. Dare we suggest that duffers were more common when Bradman batted? After all, of his 6,996 Test runs, 1,968 came at home against modest attacks from India, South Africa and West Indies, and at an average of 140. And though it’s true Tendulkar has made five hundreds in nine Test innings against Bangladesh, he has faced a wider variety of attacks and conditions. It may be no surprise that his average is merely in the mid-50s. Bradman got more bad balls to hit, just as the batters from baseball’s golden age got more sluggable pitches. The same principle holds true in English football: in 1927-28, Dixie Dean scored 60 league goals; in the Premier League season of 2011-12, the top scorer was Robin van Persie, with 30.
Perhaps Tendulkar’s century of centuries will become another of those lost standards: something that says important things not just about the person who achieved them, but about the times in which the record was achieved. It’s not precisely that no one could ever be as good as Bradman – just that no one will have the same opportunity to collect such an average. And perhaps that will be the same with Tendulkar’s century. For what international career in this intense age will ever last as long as his?
Other sports throw up records that seem unbeatable. When Mark Spitz won seven swimming gold medals at the Munich Olympic Games of 1972, it seemed like a record for all time. But Michael Phelps managed eight at Beijing in 2008. He now has 18 golds over three Games, and 22 medals all told. Multiple medal-winning is more possible in swimming than in any other Olympic sport, but those figures – 18 and 22 – will take a great deal of beating. Phelps and Spitz stand out over the narrative of swimming like Tendulkar and Bradman in cricket. The numbers tell the story.
There are those who believe Sir Steve Redgrave’s five golds in five successive Olympics is an even finer achievement. Rowing is an endurance event and it is hugely demanding: doubling up – and Redgrave tried that in 1988, when he won gold and a much-forgotten bronze – is considered next to impossible. Five is a number that fizzes and burns across Olympic history.
Oddly, cricket’s big numbers are more readily compared with the numbers amassed by athletes in individual sports. That’s because cricket, not quite uniquely, is a team game based on individual duels. It has always tended to celebrate the individual above the team. Every cricket follower knows that the highest individual Test innings is Brian Lara’s 400 not out against England in 2003-04 (a few can tell you, without pausing for breath, that the highest team score is 952 for six declared, by Sri Lanka against India in 1997-98).
There are two categories of statistical measures in sport: the first for one-off, or season-long, performances; the other for career-long achievements. We are obsessed by the notion of greatness in sport, and we traditionally measure this in terms of career. Tendulkar and Bradman stand out by whatever stats you care to call up, but it is their career-defining figures, the 99.94 and the 100, that really count.
I once conducted an argument in the pages of The Times with the cricket correspondent, Mike Atherton. I suggested Andrew Flintoff was a great cricketer, because he was great for a single summer that changed English cricket. Atherton said that wasn’t good enough for greatness. I’m prepared to argue my point to this day, but I have to concede that the popular measure of sporting greatness must span an entire career. (What about Bob Beamon, then?)
So, as we look for career-long stats relating to individuals, we must look first to golf. Golf is not a sport in the manner of cricket, since it requires no running about and no physical risk. Still, it is a pleasant pastime for people who are too old for sport or who lack the taste for it. The number we use to measure a golfer is 18: the major tournaments won by Jack Nicklaus.
Everyone in golf expected that number to be overhauled with insolent ease by Tiger Woods, who collected 14 while dominating that sport as no individual had ever done (as Bradman had dominated cricket, in fact). But then came the incident in November 2009 – unforgettably summed up in the headline “crouching tiger, hidden hydrant” – that precipitated Woods’s personal crisis. At the end of 2012, he remained stuck on 14. His lifetime achievement will be measured by how close he gets to, or by how far he surpasses, the figure of 18.
In tennis, the measure of greatness is the number of singles victories in the grand slam tournaments. The open-era champion here is Steffi Graf on 22, with Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert on 18 each. In the men’s game, Roger Federer is the leading all-time player with 17. Of the top four currently playing, Rafael Nadal has 11 and Novak Djokovic six. Andy Murray has one: in another era, one less stuffed like a Strasbourg goose with talent, he would surely have collected more. Yet we measure him not by his ability, but by his number.
When Federer was at the top, he was considered to be the finest player to have lifted a racket – tennis’s Bradman, nothing less. Before him came Pete Sampras. Sampras was no artist, l
ike Federer. He had a game of brutal, pared-down simplicity: the last great serve-and-volleyer. People said that he was boring. I used to reply: well, if you find excellence boring, find something more your size. I believe wrestling is rather amusing.
I loved watching Sampras, especially at Wimbledon, as he made his inevitable march on the previous highest total of slams. He eventually passed Roy Emerson’s 12, winning 14 before he retired. Perhaps the finest tennis match I have seen was the Wimbledon final of 1999, when Andre Agassi, at the very peak of his game, played a perfect match against Sampras. But Sampras simply moved beyond perfection and beat him – impossibly, unforgettably – in straight sets.
He won the match on a second-serve ace. Afterwards, an American journo asked: “What was going through your mind at the time, Pete?” There was a baffled pause, before Sampras said: “There was absolutely nothing going through my mind at the time.”
And I was enlightened. I was enlightened in the sudden manner of a Zen follower. It was in that Zen doctrine of no-mind – the notion that too much thought gets in the way of truth – that Sampras had his being. He is, or was, the Zen master of sport. I wrote this, and later received a letter of agreement: “And I am a Zen master myself…”