Kevin Pietersen, no fan of Alastair Cook or of the English cricket establishment, which had him unceremoniously sacked from the England cricket team, has turned into a bitter critic of Cook recently. England haven’t won even one of the last 10 Tests played by them. This is attributed to Cook’s poor captaincy, which has not been helped with his form as the senior opening batsman. Cook’s disastrous performance with the bat, with him scoring only 129 runs from 9 innings from all the Test matches played this summer, having been without a hundred for the last 2 years, has only served to make him ripe for Pietersen’s attacks through the press.
Kevin Pietersen wanted Cook to step down immediately, saying that he was in the job only because of politics as his sacking would be one more PR disaster for the England cricket board. He wanted Cook to give up captaincy for his own good and to concentrate on his batting, get urgent coaching if required.
England have lost 6 Test so far this summer and winning against a resurgent Indian team which tasted only its second success at the Lord’s early this week seems a highly unlikely possibility, given his own poor form, as well as the physical exhaustion that seems to have affected his strike bowling duo of Stuart Broad and James Anderson
Pietersen was particularly harsh on Cook, saying his being in the team was entirely political. According to Pietersen, “At the moment only politics are keeping Cook in a job because the ECB backed him so much that it would be yet another PR disaster if it sacked him now. But the ECB needs his runs back more than anything else so a big decision has to be made. Forget the bad headlines for once.”
Pietersen wrote that Cook lacked the tactical brain to lead England and would be much better served to play as just a batsman and work on his game. Cook is England’s leading century maker, with one more hundred than Pietersen, and there was a time when it was thought that he was the most likely batsman of his generation to go on to break Sachin Tendulkar’s records for the highest career Test runs and most number of Test hundreds. But his current pathetic form, which has lasted more than two years, make such an eventuality almost impossible.
Pietersen talked about how good Cook used to be, scoring big hundreds that set the game up for England and wished he could get that sort of form back.KP says, “He could have another 10 years left but his batting requires emergency help and he needs to speak to someone away from the England set-up. He has to be honest with himself.”
In an apparent barb at England’s coach, Peter Moores, who has no experience of playing international cricket, Pietersen said that being surrounded by a coaching staff filled with non-international players was hurting Cook, alleging that the England captain was getting bad advice.
As KP says, “Cook needs people with experience of international cricket around him, which [the England coaching team] Peter Moores and Paul Farbrace lack. Look at Marvan Atapattu working with Sri Lanka, Rahul Dravid with India, Shane Warne with Australia. How many ex-international players have England had recently working with them? None. There is so much knowledge in English cricket going to waste. There are so many great cricket brains in the Sky studios. Put that radio in your ear, listen to them on the balcony or in the dressing room and Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussain, Warne or whoever could be saying something you didn’t know and could implement in the game.”
It is obvious that Pietersen has an axe to grind, but the points made by him are intelligent and very valid. Cook has been so poor as both as a batsman and as a captain that Pietersen’s comments can no longer be dismissed by the English cricket establishment as that of a disgruntled ex-player.
The third Test of the Investec Test series begins tomorrow at the Rose Bowl ground in Southampton. Another poor performance by Cook and a loss there would probably bring things to a serious inflection point, from which there would be no going back.
