Amid the fallout from the gripping but mutually destructive open warfare of the past few days, it may have escaped the attention of most of the cricket-loving public that the England and Wales Cricket Board has a new chief executive.
The previous incumbent, David Collier, certainly got out at the right time. Given the slow-motion car crash played out in public across radio stations, television networks and on Twitter, neither Kevin Pietersen nor the ECB is likely to emerge from the wreckage undamaged.
It is the governing body, however, that has more to lose. It is three years since an England side, including Pietersen, gathered in a delirious huddle in the middle at Edgbaston to celebrate beating India by an innings and 242 runs and becoming the No. 1 Test side in the world.
A few months earlier they had performed Graeme Swann’s “sprinkler” dance in Sydney as the ECB pointed to the first overseas Ashes win in 24 years as justification for its strategy of selling exclusive TV rights to Sky and reinvesting the proceeds in the game.
Michael Vaughan, the former England captain who has been among the most lucid and perceptive of those offering their opinion over recent days, said then that England could dominate the decade.
“The mentality of the England side is very, very strong. England has the opportunity to become a side like that West Indies side [of the 1970s and 1980s] or that Australia side [of the 1990s].”
The fact that did not happen, dissolving into the very public mudslinging of the past few months that reached a climax this week, is an indictment on all involved.
The confidence that flowed through that side ultimately hardened into an arrogance that, whatever your view on Pietersen’s characterisation of it as “bullying”, not only damaged togetherness on the pitch but made the majority of the squad an unappealing prospect to the public.
Likewise, the ECB was perhaps guilty of thinking it had cracked it.
There seemed to be a belief that the Andy Flower regime, backed up by central contracts and the cash flooding into the game, was a blueprint for ongoing success.
Just as admiration for the attention to detail and steely focus of the side built by the pair mockingly dismissed by Pietersen as “the Andys” dissolved into mockery of the 82-page list of goji berry and quinoa nutritional requirements that accompanied them on the ill-fated Ashes tour in 2013-14, so the very things that had provided the blueprint for success at the ECB began to eat away at them. As the wheels fell off in Australia, perhaps faster than anyone expected, there was a feeling of an era coming to an end off the pitch as well as on it.
The ECB has been deservedly mocked over its mishandling of the both the vaguely ludicrous Pietersen reintegration process post-“Textgate” and his subsequent sacking this February.
ECB is determined to stand behind Flower, now in a role overseeing the academy, and Peter Moores, the man who is now coach and is described by Pietersen as a “human triple espresso”.
At some point, though, someone will have to stick his head above the parapet.
The charges of a bullying culture are so serious that to leave them unanswered is dangerous. To blithely assume that the ECB has nothing to learn from the affair would confirm many of Pietersen’s allegations.
Whereas Pietersen’s England career has definitively reached the end of the road, the ECB is at a crossroads. The looming World Cup is unlikely to offer too much comfort on the pitch. There is also much work to do off it.
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014
