He’s a tall man, Kevin Pietersen, and he casts a long shadow. It loomed large over the Long Room at Lord’s last week where the great, the good, and the not very good at all of the cricket world had gathered for the annual Wisden dinner, one of the most enjoyable events in the life of man. For starters, indeed only a few minutes before we did get stuck into our starters, the hapless Paul Downton had been suddenly sacked as managing director of English cricket.
It seems nonsense to blame Downton for all the failures of the England team, but he was the main man in the room for the botched firing of Pietersen last year. Rather than just drop him for cricketing reasons, Downton made much of KP’s general ‘attitude’, as if he was a naughty schoolboy rather than someone who had scored more than 8,000 Test runs.
Most popular
David Butterfield
Most-read 2024: Decline and fall – how university education became infantilised
In his editor’s notes to the 2015 Wisden, the admirable Lawrence Booth gave the ECB a deserved kicking for the KP shenanigans, not to mention the dropping of Cook, the World Cup catastrophe, and a ‘nexus of self-preservation’ led by the outgoing ECB chairman, Giles Clarke.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in