Free The Shorter Wisden 2013 by Co., John Wisden Page A

most
memorable year for British sport, the cricketers had finally chipped in.
    We
really
need to talk about Kevin
    Tea was approaching on the second day at Nagpur when Anderson bowled Virender Sehwag for a duck and ran straight into the arms of Pietersen at backward point. The explanation
was disappointingly simple, a case of falling headlong into the nearest embrace. But the symbolism! After a year in which Pietersen bestrode social media like a virtual colossus, here was the
strangest thing: a real-life exchange with a previously hostile team-mate, and not a BlackBerry or an “LOL” in sight. It felt like a modern morality tale.
    There were moments in 2012 when Pietersen’s behaviour appeared to recall the Italian footballer Giorgio Chinaglia, who was once asked if it was true he had played with Pelé.
“No,” he said. “Pelé played with me.” Cricket, some suspected, existed only as an extension of Pietersen’s whims (and unlike team, cricket definitely had an
“i” in it). Emboldened by a lucrative new Indian Premier League deal, he was arrogant, attempting to bulldoze over the terms of his central contract. He was self-pitying, claiming he
had never been looked after. And he was a man apart, sending silly texts to the South Africans.
    What happened next was a mishmash in many genres. A soap opera became a panto when Pietersen was booed at a county match in Southampton. His team-mates cast themselves in a Whitehall farce,
giggling in the wardrobe as Pietersen was mocked on a fake Twitter account. Other nations enjoyed a comedy in several acts, not least when his role at the World Twenty20 was confined to a TV
studio. And over in the Theatre of the Absurd, ECB chairman Giles Clarke spoke of reintegration – cricket’s noun of the year. Then there was Nagpur’s Bollywood hug. We await the
musical.
    The inner workings of the English game were thrust into the spotlight. Despite armchair diagnoses, only the dressing-room knew just how troublesome Pietersen had become; for outsiders to lecture
Andy Flower on man-management was plain ludicrous. But as his exile dragged on, the ECB began to look petty, if they showed their faces at all. Pietersen’s pursuit of Twenty20’s riches
at the expense of the Test side – the format which had made his name – was unattractive, although these attitudes can filter down from the top. And if there was a have-cake-and-eat-it
feel to his simultaneous grouse about excessive cricket and his yearning for the IPL, it was hard to ignore a wider truth: a bloated schedule has asked the players to make unfair choices. The
dilemma is not going away, however much English cricket wishes it would.
    Earlier in the year, there had been a hint of double standards, too. When Stuart Broad branded county newspaper reporters “liars”, “muppets” and “jobsworths”
– on Twitter, naturally – the slurs evaporated into cyberspace. Yet when Pietersen questioned the commentary credentials of Nick Knight, who works for Sky Sports, bankrollers of the
English game, he was fined. Insults were being graded by the supposed importance of their victims.
    But all was not lost. In India, England were a better, more watchable, team for the inclusion of a fully engaged Pietersen. And, painful though the process was, the ECB had waylaid his
international retirement. More than that, they may have saved a man from himself. Pietersen, it turned out, needed England more than he realised, just as England were acknowledging they would
prefer not to live without Pietersen; no one said marriages of convenience were easy. Yet amid it all were perhaps the stirrings of a realisation – that while hero-worship at the IPL may feed
the ego, a long Test career is more likely to nourish the soul.
    Tired but not emotional
    Strauss deserved better than the finale he got, but his response to the turmoil that dominated the run-up to the Lord’s Test against South Africa showed why he had been
one of