Kevin Pietersen: Here’s how to keep up with KP - the walking ego

New film reveals surprising sides to a complex character

Kevin Pietersen makes a point in training with the Sunfoil Dolphins in South Africa last month, one of his stopovers as an itinerant T20 batsman (Getty Images)

Kevin Pietersen was sceptical when the filmmakers who were trying to capture his world suggested that he be miked up throughout a match in Trinidad, captaining St Lucia in the Caribbean Twenty20.

He need not have been. The footage of Pietersen’s part in that game back in June provides an unexpurgated sense of what it is to be in his boots on a cricket pitch and what England might have held on to had they been able to manage him. For an individual characterised as a walking ego – “the only guy I know who fell in love with himself at 16 and has been faithful ever since,” as Darren Gough tells it in the film, to be screened by ITV on Thursday night – it is the collaborative aspect of Pietersen’s captaincy which surprises most.

Who should he bowl at the end of the innings, he asks his team. Is he right to follow a hunch and bowl a spinner from the start? Perhaps inevitably, he ends up dominating all alone, with 42 off 26 balls for St Lucia Zouks and a boundary catch that sends him into a string of euphoric expletives.

Pietersen divides opinion so graphically that a full examination of the inner man would require an eight-part series. “Black or white, no grey areas,” as his father, Jannie, tells the filmmakers. There are plenty within the sport who will sneer at the mere suggestion that “Pietersen” and “team” are mutually inclusive. But sometimes it takes an outsider to point out what is right in front of your eyes.

“You have to treat the great players differently,” Jamie Redknapp says of Pietersen. “In football, I wanted them in my team because I knew that they would win the game for us, and that’s the most important thing.”

Shane Warne is far more trenchant about Pietersen’s estrangement. “If you treat him well, if you make him feel important, you get the best out of him,” he says. “It was poor management of that [England] group, not getting the best out of him.”

It is that “make him feel important” which seems significant. Outside of the England bubble, egoism, vanity and occasional narcissistic tendencies are an unfortunate, accepted by-product of obsessive sporting brilliance.

The film is the latest offering from the independent Goalhanger Films, which is developing a reputation for providing a more complete picture of the individuals about whom the general public is not so sure.

The outfit’s recent BBC Wayne Rooney documentary, The Man Behind The Goals, began as a football film and evolved, because of the player’s wish for openness, into something much broader – with Coleen Rooney making sandwiches for the crew and her husband driving executive producer Tony Pastor and his colleagues to the station when they were done.


 Shane Warne says it was poor management by England not to get the best out of Pietersen (Getty)
 (Getty Images)

Tonight is a journey into Pietersen’s London home and to the South African family in the bushveld, though the overwhelming impression it leaves is one of pathos. England’s all-time leading run-scorer, for whom only Gough and Michael Vaughan from English cricket speak up, has been reduced to the status of itinerant batsman, travelling the world with passport and bat, waiting to find where he will next smash some cricket balls before repairing back to west London.

It is not an environment to which one of such achievements ought to be consigned. Though Pietersen’s old obsessions about training still burn – the conviction he’s always had a thing about “taking training right into game time” gets an airing – the practice surface at Trinidad’s Queen’s Park club in Port of Spain is so poor that he dare not face the Zouks’ Shannon Gabriel on it.

It’s the footage of the young Zouks players on the cramped little mini-bus with him, Pietersen laughing and holding court, which creates a sense of why this obscurity has provided what England did not. There’s then a telling moment when the cameras follow him to Surrey, where he briefly shipped up after hopes of an England call-up were rekindled. “I’m making a documentary,” he tells Alec Stewart. “What is it? Panorama?” he replies.

Shooting the in-game footage was a hunch which paid some dividends, says Pastor, the former controller of sport production for ITV. “What you never get on film is the discussions which go on on the field. He didn’t assume he was the best in that environment. He wasn’t seeking reassurance of his greatness. He was capable of being very funny but also forthright. If he didn’t agree with the coach’s view he would say.”

Thoughts are clearly turning to what might lie beyond cricket. “Golf,” he says. His wife, Jessica, believes he was only half-joking when he suggested pursuing it professionally. In the meantime, there is more open road. He has committed to the inaugural Pakistan T20 next February.

'Being Kevin Pietersen', ITV4, 10pm Thursday