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(I had a convivial evening in a hostlery in the City last night and was in no mood or position to write a post).
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Being Outside Cricket 
Timmy has just posted this on the previous post:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/kevinpietersen/11471832/Kevin-Pietersen-poised-to-ditch-IPL-deal-and-play-county-cricket-to-secure-England-Test-return-and-Ashes-chance.html
Is Nick Hoult right? He usually is. 🙂
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I think Dobell has been dropping hints all week. This is just confirmation.
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This is the tweet from George Dobell that had me convinced:
@luke10harper Resting for a few months. Like KP. It’ll be back. Like KP.
10:28am – 10 Mar 15
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Most interesting. 🙂
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Don’t rule out KP to Hampshire as Bransgrove would love to rip the ECB apart for their International match ‘sharing’ and he also needs to get supporters back to the ‘RoseBowl’ ( I won’t call it by whatever the current sponsor is)
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and hey, helicopter travel ‘tween Rose Bowl and London is easily done (not that I’ve used it much! lol) – I’m sure Mr Bransgrove would accommodate KP’s needs
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Don’t forget Bogfather – Pietersen doesn’t live in London anymore.
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Of course, his and his missus’s kids haircut salon in London closed in January…so he’s a free agent!
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Key quote: “I’ve still got more decisions to make – it’s weekend now so nobody will be picking up their phones, but (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday) will be very exciting, hopefully.”
Interesting stat 1: ” He has only played nine championship matches since making his Test debut almost a decade ago but has scored runs with ease on those occasions, including four centuries and one double hundred”. Nine since 2005! That’s Giles Clarke’s legacy right there.
Interesting stat 2: 78% in the DT poll at the moment want him back in the team. But then the DT is a nest of KP-fanboys (starts frothing at the mouth).
Nick Hoult does it again! ‘Exclusive’ slightly overdoes it though as Tom Collomosse in the Standard got there first three or four days ago. Selvey, Brenkley, Newman and Agnew can carry on reporting what Downton has to say as if it matters but, frankly, they might as well get ouija board out and ask the ghost of George Mann.
Now to have a look round and see if the forces of reaction have woken up yet…..
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Newman has a piece up. Vindictive? Of course. Struggling to adjust to a new reality? Absolutely. Says it’s not true? No.
“The first step of a very long journey back”. (Some CC runs aren’t that long, old chap)
“Pietersen was picked up relatively cheaply by the Hyderabad Sunrisers of the IPL this year in a deal worth around £200,000 making it less expensive for him to throw in his lot with an as yet unnamed county and try to call Graves bluff”. (“Cheaply”? Oh cling to that piece of bitterness like the driftwood in the maelstrom it is. “As yet unnamed county”? Keep telling yourself he won’t find one…. “Graves bluff”. Pietersen has met Graves intermediaries and has been persuaded it’s genuine. Newman listens to Downton. Who to believe…..?).
“A comeback, approaching 35”. (so he’s 34? At least unlike Selvey and DDB Newman doesn’t just lie about Pietersen’s age).
“England’s need is greatest in one-day cricket, the format of the game Pietersen least enjoyed during his later years with England”. (Still implying he was shirking rather than badly injured I see. And you seriously think that the batting line-up that gorged on poor old Pankaj Singh is going to do the same to Boult and Southee and Johnson and Harris and Starc?).
“If he came back it would be hard to see how he could work with senior players like Alastair Cook, Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson as well as coach Peter Moores, who he tried to force out in 2009, managing director Paul Downton, who sacked him last year, and national selector James Whitaker”. (Senior players whose first and only worry should be about whether they are still worth their place in the team. Moores, Downton and Whitaker are a different story – have you grasped the implications yet, Paul, old bean?).
“For Pietersen to come back now a lot of people would have to either depart or rebuild some seriously broken bridges”. (You’re writing that because you believe it to be so laughably impossible, aren’t you? Consider it seriously. It isn’t. Regional managers at a stationery firm don’t meet their third quarter targets – again. Head office parts with their services. Happens every day).
Next story – journalist spectacularly backs wrong horse and pours vitriol and ignites it on the bridge back. Stay on that far bank jumping up and down or look for a row boat back and start rowing. Them’s the choices, Newman.
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Nothing at the Indy yet – just a ho-ho-ho- aren’t-we-so-wry piece that England fans should “embrace losing”. The mentality of Agnew and his ilk in a nutshell.
How’s this for a line? “A couple of weeks ago I happened to meet a man in his early thirties, who grew up in Surrey, went to boarding school and has absolutely no connection to the north of England”?
I have no idea who Tom Peck is – but that sounds like just the sort of chap he hangs out with. Reverse snobbery? Probably, but when he writes a paragraph of unpleasant snidey-ness about Mark Butcher, I’m sorry, there’s no benefit of the doubt coming his way.
To be fair to the Indy, they were the only national paper to pick up on Collomosse during the week and Bunkers is still in la-la-land listening to the comforting words of Downton – so they have a pass of sorts for now.
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Our paper press (those usual virtual reality vanity normality non-entities) and waitrose warblers are currently digging holes so deep that the 4th estate will be swallowed whole into their own black-hole and still not realise how ridiculous they sound
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The Mirror and the BBC report the story but don’t add much. Dean Wilson has a quote from Glenn McGrath – ““With KP coming back into the side it would bolster the batting lineup, there is no doubt about that.It would definitely strengthen the side and maybe I’ll have to reassess my thinking on the score. A player of KP’s calibre is too good not to be playing. It is a waste, but if he comes back in then he’ll give the boys a lot more confidence.” So Australians aren’t trembling in their boots at a Ballance/Bell/Root middle order whatever Newman may be dreaming.
Ali Martin doesn’t add much at the Guardian either. There’s a sour ” according to a report in the Daily Telegraph – the newspaper for which the exiled batsman is a paid columnist” line. Does the Guardian still really believe they are the heroic bastion of journalistic independence? I think they very well might.
All Martin adds is, “the Guardian understands another perceived hurdle, the prospect of him playing under the head coach, Peter Moores, the man who was sacked from his first spell in the job in early 2009 after clashing with then-captain Pietersen, might not be as great a problem as first thought”. You don’t need to be Alan Turing to believe Martin has spoken to Moores. Moores has taken a ‘I didn’t fall out with KP, he fell out with me’ line for a while so it isn’t that much of a revelation.
Both the BBC and Guardian suggest that Surrey is Pietersen’s most likely destination. We’ll see if our friend TheBogfather knows more than those two put together! Nothing yet from George Dobell.
The reporting has two common elements – i) they haven’t really thought the implications through. They are like a nervous race horse looking at a fence and thinking, “no way”. Walk up to it, have a look and suddenly it doesn’t seen so impossible and you can see the other side ii) They are all assuming this is a desperate bid originating from KP. Graves started it, you clots. Pietersen has met Graves’s intermediaries and is persuaded they are serious. Graves must have thought the implications through (who has to go and who can survive with their heads banged together). Of course Graves is acting out of KP-love but his guiding light would appear ‘get the talent on the pitch’ rather than ‘magnificence in the dressing room and tightness as a unit’. About effing time…..
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Simon, I had to laugh at those quotes from Agnew you put up yesterday about how England might not do well this summer. For the last 8 months he has had his head rammed up his bottom. Deluded into thinking we are still good at Test match cricket. Now, slowly but surely a lightbulb has come on in his head. Like an oncoming freight train looming into the distance he sees the potential debarcle of this summers Ashes.
All this guff about we don’t care about ODIs because we are brilliant at Test cricket is melting like snow in the sun. By the end of this summer we may not be regarded as much cop at Tests either. For the last 3 months he has banged on and on about how Cook is going to have a nice rest and then come back and win the Ashes. Now it doesn’t look quite so certain.
Even on Monday night he was still selling this snake oil on 5 live. When it was pointed out by Boycott that if the Aussie quicks are in good form we are going to lose he was still glossing over the reality. Now suddenly he has moved to to ‘England need to show improvement. ‘ If he lowers the bar any further down, only a grain of sand will fail to get over it.
As for Newman. Always funny when he proves yet again that for him it is all about KP. The Daily Mail have created a job for him that involves being a journalist that only covers one person.
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John Etheridge hidden behind a paywall of course but this is probably the line he is taking –
(Ensuing conversation worth a quick look as well)
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Guardian has a piece up about Pietersen return by Vic Marks -with enabled comments!
Expect carnage.
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“For the last 3 months he has banged on and on about how Cook is going to have a nice rest and then come back and win the Ashes.”
Ah, with the clocks going forward soon, it’s surely time for the first airing of the English cricket press’s least favourite stat:
Alastair Cook’s average against Australia at home is 26.26.
This is the lowest average of any England opening batsman to have opened the batting in at least two full series at home v Australia since the start of the year I was born, i.e. 1972. There are seven such men*. Yes, it’s lower than Michael Atherton’s. In fact, it’s lower than Mike Brearley’s (!), although Brearley only opened in one full series and batted at three for most of the 1981 Ashes.
Please keep quoting this throughout British Summer Time, at least until he manages to pass his highest score at home to Australia (which is, inevitably, 95….) or manages to overtake Brearley and Atherton.
* being:
G Boycott 54.80
AJ Strauss 45.63
ME Trescothick 37.60
JH Edrich 35.88
GA Gooch 33.91
MA Atherton 31.24
(JM Brearley 28.00; 27.44 as opener in 1977, plus 48 and 13 at Edgbaston in 1981)
AN Cook 26.26
PS Can you believe Alec Stewart only opened once against Australia? What sort of madness? He managed 87 and 16, so obviously they never bothered again.
PPS Can you believe only six openers have made hundreds opening at home against Australia in all that time? Four of the men named above plus Joe Root and Tim Robinson.
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That line about Graves should have read “is NOT acting out of KP-love” of course.
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Mark, that was so yesterday’s argument! Ashes, schmashes! The priority now is the 2019 WC. We’re building to that end! Transitioning, even. Let’s sacrifice everything to that golden dawn. Nobody over thirty can ever play for England again! Ah, now who does that include? You see what they’re doing….?
To be fair to Newman (did I just type that?), KP kind of is the story this morning! Trying to pretend he isn’t would be worse. Newman could be tweeting pictures of his hotel room….. like Selvey.
As for Agnew, he’s like some Sunday teatime BBC programme. His Twitter account is more like an audition for some travel show than that of a cricket journalist. ‘Reassuring World with Jonathan Agnew’ would be brilliant – someone ought to commission a series!.
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That’s one quality hundred, Brendan Taylor.
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Beautifully timed run chase by India, Re-arranged batting order by Australia worked well too
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Except for me. I had predicted Faulkner to score most runs below 6, so it would help me if he gets to bat below 6.
Pity the batting let Scotland down on too many occasions. And the bowling against the Afghanistan tail.
There were certainly a few good performances though. Koetzer’s 156 against Bangladesh was the highest WC score in a losing cause. Josh Davey must be devastated. 15 wickets, at 20.73 in 6 innings. That is one more than the trio of Woakes, Broad and Anderson managed between them (at 52) in 17 innings.
Sri Lanka – South Africa has been all but confirmed (unless Pakistan somehow win by an extremely massive margin against Ireland, or Ireland by an even more extreme margin). And, obviously West Indies are at an enormous disadvantage that both Ireland and Pakistan will know exactly what they need to do to qualify, or even qualify together, as their game is just about to start.
Interestingly enough we have had only 2 dead games with nothing at stake (other than the premium for winning): England – Afghanistan, and India – Zimbabwe. All other games were “live”, and could influence qualification and / or the ranking order among the qualifiers.
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I think it was important Australia won, the implications otherwise would have put Australia, New Zealand and South Africa together. At least this way there is balance to both sides of the draw and the possibility of cracking matches!
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And yet, in his guts, Selvey knows that, but for a dodgy line-call by an Australian third umpire, England would have taken them down…..
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https://twitter.com/fwildecricket/status/576530177230004225
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WWWWWWWWWWWWWW you say?
Yeah but we would have killed them with Broady, Belly & co!
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In a bizarre BTL conversation on the Telegraph.
Replied to someone we all know who said Bell did his job – whilst defending him as he was clearly not amongst our biggest problems of the World Cup, I also said “I wouldn’t exactly say Bell “did his job”. He would have been tasked with getting hundreds not fifties.”.
Seems pretty reasonable?
Got a different poster replying saying, among other things,:
“If getting batsmen to score hundreds is as easy as saying ‘your role is to score hundreds’, then why don’t they just say that to all of the players in every format. Actually, why don’t they just tell them to get doubles or triples, and tell them to get them at as SR of at least 200. Heck, let’s make it a SR of 300…. It is the team’s average score which is the determinant of it’s ‘winningness’. Whether or not any individual scores hundreds has absolutely not one sausage to do with it. Zero. Zilch. Not a jot.”
My head hurts just trying to understand the argument where scoring hundreds does not help win games. Or the argument where scoring lots of centuries doesn’t mean you score a lot of runs.
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How do these kind of people survive in everyday life?
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Was one of the posters Jackiel by any chance?
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jackiel/poetseye/battingforbell was the person I first responded to (the “someone we all know” I referred to!). The person with the illogical nonsense was another poster.
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Just seen your post below – the nonsense was from ballsintheright area!
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He’s on the DT these days, is he? I don’t have a DT account and haven’t looked at their threads for a while.
My favourite from him was his claim that Chris Woakes was as good as Jacques Kallis!
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Yeah, I think he’s a fairly new poster at the DT. Another argument I’m currently involved in (along with Vian) is with someone trying to claim that Pietersen was inconsistent. When the facts clearly suggest otherwise!
I mostly like the comments at the DT, there’s some good discussions and the volume is manageable (the Guardian tends to have far more comments per article).
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I admire your patience in dealing with the guy who thinks any passionate cricket fan is remotely interested in a batsman’s standard deviation.
Only in England, surely…
…actually no, I remember Martin Crowe writing a similar article about Pietersen last year, with all that cobblers about “if we ignore three of the greatest innings played by any batsman in the recent history of Test cricket, Pietersen was a bit crap really.”
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I’ve just posted a grid of stats on the DT (% of Test scores in certain brackets) which comprehensively show that the poster claiming Pietersen was “volatile”, “random” and “inconsistent” was talking complete bollocks.
Sadly, I’ve also comprehensively proved I don’t have a life…
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Love a bit of #RootMaths. If you ignore the centuries, every batsman is crap.
Did you know that the best #RootMaths batsman in history is Angelo Mathews?
http://goo.gl/v2PYRd
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The other thing I remember (because clivejw used to post it nearly every day!) is that Pietersen’s Test average never dipped below 40 in a calendar year until 2013. That is remarkably consistent and something you most definitely cannot say for Alastair Cook.
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Pat Murphy just said on 5 live KP will go back to Surrey under Alec Stewart and Ford his former South African coach. Deal could be done by Friday. Tom Moody has said KP can opt out of IPL contract.
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If true, expect all those who worked themselves into high dudgeon (and, boy, was their dudgeon high) about Pietersen’s ‘muppet’ comment suddenly to discover that D2 bowling isn’t ‘all that’……
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Yes,well, moving goalposts is not a problem for England cricket writers. They should all be landscape gardeners with the skill they have for digging things up and moving them about.
Murphy said this issue of finding KP a county is only the first hurdle. The biggest being James Whitaker, the chief selector, who said KP will never play for England again. Of course he may just have been following orders. (Why do so many at the ECB have to use the Nazi defence at Nuremberg?)
I still can’t see it happening. But if it does, the pearl clutching by the cricket establishment will be a sight to see. We may have to call for fainting couches to accommodate all the vapours.
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Funnily enough, I’d just been thinking the same about Whitaker and the Nuremberg defence. You need it more around English cricket than the forward defence!
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Unless it is against Essex, at an opening batsman who maketh the ladies swoon.
Even the West Indies pace battery were mere apprentices, compared to the fantastic bowling A.N. Cook has to face.
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Kp shouldn’t do that (go to Surrey) if he’s serious it needs to be a div one club
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Not seen him around Guardian threads for a while. Good to know his line hasn’t changed –
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The rest is held in moderation and will appear in time.
Second and third posts are the wrong way round – although it’s such gibberish it doesn’t make much difference!
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This is who I was referring to above… Doesn’t think that centuries are important, or that centuries mean lots of runs!
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So he’s a moron then!
These clowns have destroyed English cricket for no other reason than to feed their irrational hatred of KP. Kicking KP was more important than English success.,
And now they want to lecture about management procedure.
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That’s one way of putting it, yes!
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More drivel from Vaughan:
“If he goes to Surrey and scores two or three double hundreds and England’s form continues like it is at the minute, there is a small possibility we might see Kevin Pietersen in an England jersey again this summer.”
Surrey’s first match is in Cardiff on April 19th. If KP plays, I am so there.
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DDB on the Guardian had me in shock
“If this will really benefit England then I support it, but I’m not sure it will.”
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Another trawl round the papers and not much new about KP. The Indy have an Agency story up (where’s Bunkers – in one?). One curiosity is that story reports KP as tweeting “£626£185” as opposed to “#626#185” which has to be an unfortunate oversight, right? Nobody would deliberately change # to £…..
Berry has a piece up about Pietersen criticising Moores in his media capacity. It’s somewhat anti-Pietersen but not foaming at the mouth. It isn’t headlined ‘KP scorns Moores’ which is one up on the Guardian. Pietersen’s criticisms are of course entirely reasonable and no more than what a heck of a lot of other people have said.
I’d missed Newman’s earlier report on the Afghanistan match. It contains “then came another strange press conference from a captain who has been a massive disappointment since taking over from Alastair Cook”. Just what you said about your boy after his press conferences and disappointments! Then it wasn’t all “signs of returning to his best” and “at least he kept his dignity”, was it? And then straight from the Selvey school of self-delusion we have, “the bottom line is that England should have been heading to Melbourne today for a World Cup quarter-final against an India team they defeated twice in the tri-series here before their world fell apart. They could even have won that and reached the semi-finals, and from there who knows what might have happened”. They actually believe that. Despite it all, they still believe it. Incredible.
Annie has a post on TFT saying that in a radio item with Agnew there was mention that Flower was setting the fields in the WC. Can anyone say more about that? If true, that disappears off the scale of outrageousness.
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You should write a blog, Simon!
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🙂
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Oh man that is just too funny. I doubt we will ever get the evidence to prove it mind. However if it’s true then Moores is nothing more than a human remote control. Operated by Flower from his living room.
This is beyond satire.
A lot of people have remarked how Morgan has sounded more and more like a pod person as his captaincy has developed. There must be some fabulous emails going back and forth from the England coach and ECB central. Pity the NSA can’t leak a few.
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Woke up at 5.40am and switched on Sky. Australia were playing, Starc was running in and bowled a 145kph+ yorker, which cleaned up the Scotland player’s stumps. This was the very first thing I saw, upon switching the TV on. I went into the kitchen, came back moments later and Scotland were all out. I had only been out of the room for 30 seconds, what has happened I thought?! I watched the replay, again full pitched, very fast and swinging from Starc, cleaned the batsmen up. So why am I recounting this, well this brief moment, for me, encapsulated what is wrong with English cricket and right with many other nations!
Let’s add a bit more to this. Rewind to the verdict after we beat Afghanistan. Rob Key was asked about yorkers and our bowlers. ‘Well you can’t bowl six in a row’ Rob said, as it is predictable and the batsman will still smash you…….I found this comment incredible. If you bowl fast full and straight, a la Starc and as Shami and Yadav did this morning, you will get wickets and the batsman will struggle to smash you. Yet we have an ex-England player and incredibly experienced captain and county cricket player, trotting out current team England/ECBesque rubbish………
Sums up one of the main issues with our game in this country.
(Should add that I know we don’t possess the bowlers with pace to do what Starc does, but some in county cricket did, until bloughbrough got hold of them)
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Maybe he meant – with England’s bowlers you can’t trust them to get it right 6 in a row? 😉
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England top of the table at the WC! Get in!
http://goo.gl/XjKBXR
The table of DRS use that is. Amazing what can happen when Broady can’t beat the bat….
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