Kevin Pietersen acknowledges the crowd on the last day of the Oval test against Australia in 2005.
Photograph: Kieran Doherty

My hero: Kevin Pietersen by Tom Holland

The great cricketer’s career seems like something from ancient literature, argues the classics scholar – his downfall needs the language of epic to do it justice

Friday 12 December 2014

KP: The Autobiography, still high in the bestseller lists, naturally isn’t a patch on Kevin Pietersen’s Homeric batting. How could it be? Nothing he wrote could ever be as visceral or sublime as one of his great hundreds. I love him because his entire career seemed to me like something out of ancient literature. Some of his centuries – such as his very first in a Test match, scored in the teeth of ferocious Australian bowling in that golden summer of 2005 – were berserker assaults: the batting equivalents of dismembering a shield wall single-handed. Others, backlit by increasingly spectacular bust-ups with the England management, came to be dyed an almost Sophoclean hue. It was typical of Pietersen that the most physically savage of all his centuries, when he almost destroyed Dale Steyn with the sheer brute force of his hitting, should have been played even as scandal was brewing over texts he sent to South African players. The crackle and spark of controversy had always been a crucial aspect of his charisma – but increasingly, to a brilliance as unmissable as it was egocentric, it brought a charge of the tragic. Pietersen’s book, in which the indignation at his treatment by the England and Wales Cricket Board is raw on every page, is gripping enough; but in my own – admittedly histrionic – opinion, it needs the language of epic to do his downfall justice. “The sun blackens,” a Norse poet wrote of Ragnarök, twilight of the gods. “The earth sinks into the sea. The brilliant stars dash down from the skies.” KP is gone, and the world of English cricket left immeasurably a duller place.

THE GUARDIAN