Hacker: England none-for-two at the start of a shaky innings

Employees of Chelsea Football Club could be forgiven for wondering why on earth the media decided to storm Stanford Bridge on a quiet afternoon last Thursday. That is, until it became apparent that former England cricket captain Kevin Pietersen was releasing the stress of a turbulent week with a work-out at the club’s fitness centre, where he’s been known to pump iron with his pal Frank Lampard.

Indeed, Pietersen may well need to look to sports outside of cricket if he is to find support from an England international, as he is clearly not as popular with the national team’s playing staff as his enormous ego would have him believe.

Last week, the England Cricket Board was found in the midst of catastrophe heading into a tour of the Caribbean following the resignation of Pietersen—who has been throwing his toys around since England’s ill-fated tour of India last year—and the sacking of his arch-nemesis, head coach Peter Moores.

As a result of the on-going public spat between Moores and Pietersen, the ECB is now less than two weeks away from the opening match against West Indies, with no hope of securing a full-time coach until the team returns from their Caribbean tour. What’s more, if England are going to stand any chance of avoiding a repeat of 2007’s 5-0 whitewash humiliation when Aussies arrive this summer for The Ashes series, things are going to have to be sorted out sharpish.

Phase one of the ECB’s plan to resolve the present shambles that is English cricket was to swap one South African for another, appointing Andrew Strauss as Pietersen’s successor, both as Test series and One Day International captain. Some might call this decision controversial, given that Strauss has not been part of England’s ODI setup since the 2007 World Cup, but at least we can assume that a seemingly modest player like him understands the concept of captaincy. Whoever said "there is no I in team" clearly couldn’t get close enough to Pietersen to inform him.

Unsurprisingly, the ex-England skipper’s over-inflated ego eventually proved to be his downfall as, in a gesture of flagrant audacity, he remained on holiday in South Africa whilst the ECB sweated buckets over their options, having received Pietersen’s ultimatum to sack Moores or lose him permanently as captain.

Moreover, his blissful unawareness of the fact that influential members of the England team—such as Andy Flintoff and Steve Harmison—had in fact grown tired of his constant whining and turned against him, served to highlight the extent of his big-headed attitude.

Then came Pietersen’s brazenly self-centred parting statement, in which he made clear his belief that he had much more to offer as England captain, and that his reasons for stepping down were purely self-motivated, without offering a word on the impact that his petulant uproar had on the team as a whole, or mentioning how English cricket may somehow dig itself out of this fiasco under the leadership of a new captain.

The proverbial "straw that broke the camel’s back" in the Pietersen-Moores saga is believed to have been the non-inclusion of Michael Vaughan in the squad to face the Windies later this month, with Pietersen having specifically requested a place in the side for the former-captain. When Vaughan’s name did not appear on the squad list for the upcoming tour, Pietersen decided to take matters into his own hands by publically announcing his feud with Moores in his News of the World column on 4 January, a decision that was never going to lead to anything other than a media-fuelled crisis that would rip the side apart. Just ask ex-Arsenal skipper William Gallas if he’d go public over his tiff with team-mate Robin van Persie, given a second chance. I’m guessing the answer would be "no."

I am not criticising Pietersen for having a problem with his coach; issues like this are unavoidable in sport, and need to be addressed. It’s just that there is clearly a right way and a wrong way to go about addressing them, and ringing up your boss whilst on safari to tell him that he either sacks the guy or you’re walking just isn’t going to help anyone. The truth is that if you are up against someone whose point of view you disagree with, you don’t jet off to the other side of the world in a hissy-fit like Kevin Pietersen; you man up, flex your muscles and show the world that you are the right man for the job, like, I don’t know... Barack Obama. Then again, great as he is, the US president-elect isn’t exactly a case study in not using the media to get one up on your opposite number in the midst of a vicious power struggle.

But enough of politics, the fact is that England have got an Everest of problems to overcome before the holy cow of Test cricket gets underway against Australia in June. The Ashes are a certainty, though whether there will be an English phoenix to rise from them is a very different story.