A jaw-dropping moment on the front page of Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph the other day: ‘How to fix England’, read the blurb, ‘by Kevin Pietersen’. Rather like ‘How To Stamp Out Diving, by Arjen Robben’; or ‘Take Vanity out of Football, by Cristiano Ronaldo’. Pietersen joins a dressing room full of former international captains — Shane Warne, Geoffrey Boycott, and Michael Vaughan — who these days devote their column inches to slagging off Alastair Cook in particular and most of the English Test team in general.
It’s worth having a look at the flavour of the Telegraph Four’s jottings. ‘Cook’s captaincy is the worst I have ever seen’ (Warne); ‘A masterclass in how to throw away a Test win’ (Boycott); ‘How not to captain a Test team’ (Boycs again); ‘Let’s hope Cook has not opted to be boring again’ (Warne); ‘A good captain would not have axed his best player’ (Warne on KP, of course); ‘Anderson and Broad are letting Cook down’ (Vaughan); or ‘England captaincy eats away at you — sometimes you need outside help’ (Vaughan again.
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