Kevin Pietersen: The Ego Has Landed

selfish [adjective] – thinking only of oneself.

Many of you will know by now that I harbour nothing but negative feelings towards Kevin Pietersen, and that I’m certainly happy to have him spoil only Test cricket for me in the future instead of all three formats. The entertainment value he allegedly adds to the game never managed to overshadow my intense dislike of him and his stinker attitude.

Despite all that, if the timing of KP’s sudden retirement from international one-day cricket – or as I like to call it, “KP doing whatever the hell he wishes” – hadn’t been so peculiar, I may well have been saying that we should let the man earn his cash if he’s gagging for it this badly. But since he mistimed his actions so spectacularly, I can’t find it in me to be this generous.

“Yes, it was embarrassing to be seen with a money-grabbing, looks-obsessed fame-whore,” reflected Caprice

Let’s think the best of him, against every fibre of my being, and assume he did ask the ECB to be rested from the ODI series against Australia (although the inside word is that he made ‘demands’), and they turned him down. This is highly unlikely, since the Blazers usually do anything for KP, but let’s roll with it for the moment. The Blazers then told him to either play through the summer or retire – couldn’t he have gutsed it out (if playing one-dayers really is such a hardship), participated in the T20 World Cup, and then retired directly into the CLT20 and the Big Bash?

Instead, it seems as if he wanted to screw the ECB for how they handled the Moores affair and his Twitter outbursts, as if he wanted to settle who’s whose the daddy in this never-ending soap opera once and for all.

Regardless of whether the ECB’s ruling of players having to be available for all limited overs formats or none makes sense or not, he knew about the said ruling all along – and he retired from one-day cricket anyway. Probably with the petty intention of testing whether the ECB were willing to make the umpteenth concession to The Great KP and His Even Greater Ego.

And even though it meant depriving England of their prime limited-overs batsman, this time around someone decided to stand his ground – for now – and let him go.

Yes, English cricket has profited from his contributions over the years, but those benefits definitely went – and still go – both ways. Was playing a dozen one-day matches this summer for the country that welcomed him and the organization that’s been been bending over backwards for him, and allowed him to turn his indisputable talent and dickish persona into millions of pounds, really too much to ask? I don’t think so.

Yet, he decided to go down this road, and he and his camp will simply need to deal with the consequences for the brand KP™, step away from Twitter and stop blaming others for a choice he made of his own free will.

KP’s tattoo to ‘prove’ his loyalty to England: let this be a testimony to his idiocy

For some inexplicable reason, I’ve never quite rated Pietersen as a team player, and by acting like this, he’s only proved to me that he’s exactly the selfish knob I always believed him to be. With the vast majority of players, especially players who are already on the wrong side of 30, I wouldn’t begrudge them wanting to earn big (ger) money for a second. But when it comes to KP, all his slightly desperate and slightly worthless declarations of loyalty and love and whatever else to the cause of English cricket – not to mention that damn tattoo – spring to mind, which makes his clearly non-essential (i.e. not forced by injury) retirement so impossible to deal with.

Far too many people, fans and journalists alike, complain about the ECB treating T20s and ODIs as basically the same – and completely miss the point. The ECB are trying to protect the one-day game by making sure that their most talented players don’t opt out of playing it, which as long as it’s still around and World Cups are being held, is what every board should be doing and what supporters should be encouraging.

Kevin Pietersen will spend much of his spare time as a stunt double for Matt Dillon

Sure, Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott don’t play Twenty20 cricket, but they’ve never retired from the shortest form and are technically still available – they’re just not being selected due to their more conservative approach to batting not being required in Twenty20. And if people don’t want to get that, they should buy a Melbourne Renegades Membership – KP might turn out for them next winter.

People can believe that KP did what he had to do for a higher cause, that he sacrificed himself for the greater good of English cricket, and that it had nothing to do with money whatsoever, but I’m never going to buy into it; and thankfully, I’m not alone in that.

Kevin Pietersen only ever thinks of what’s best for Kevin Pietersen, and his decision to retire now and throw England’s limited overs teams and their inexperienced captains to the wolves in the lead-up to the T20 World Cup is yet another act of a self-serving prima donna, who is now free to go and earn his cash wherever he wants to buy himself all the lip balm and loafers in the world.

And I sincerely hope the door hits him on the way out.

written by @lemayol, a cricket cynic with a worrying weakness for both ginger left-handers and wacky wicketkeepers.

So what do you think about KP’s retirement? join in the mass debate and leave your comment below!

Tweet

You beauty!! Back to London.. Week off!! #boom

— Kevin Pietersen (@kevinpp24) May 28, 2012

This time next week I’m on the other side of the world… #boom

— Kevin Pietersen (@kevinpp24) June 9, 2012