Originally published in 2013; illustration  by Joe Provis

When George Lucas sat down in the mid-1970s to write a film script set in a galaxy far, far away, he had high ambitions. His aim was to make a film of literally mythic power. His manual was a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which the author, Joseph Campbell, argued that mythologies everywhere all draw on the same basic themes. This is why the story of a great hero has such universal appeal. His feats, his flaws, the arc of his quest: all reach deep into the subconscious. Lucas learned the lesson well. The result, of course, was Star Wars.

Sport, unlike a movie, has no script. People would never watch it otherwise. Even so, there is the odd sportsman whose career strikes such chords in the imagination that it is hard not to feel that someone, somewhere, must have made him up. English cricket has certainly not been lacking for heroes these past 10 years. A decade ago, few fans would have imagined in their wildest dreams that England might end up three-times Ashes victors, and briefly top the Test rankings.

Andrew Flintoff and Michael Vaughan, Andrew Strauss and Graeme Swann: these are names fit to rank with any in English cricket history. The present captain – a clean-cut former chorister who just cannot help himself scoring centuries – could hardly look more like a hero if he tried. Yet Joseph Campbell, in the admittedly improbable event that he could be resurrected and endowed with a working knowledge of cricket, would present none of these stars with the palm. There is only the one possible candidate. Kevin Pietersen may not have a lightsabre, but he is undoubtedly English cricket’s very own Hero with a Thousand Faces.

A successful captain can either assault this establishment – as Greig ultimately did – or end up, in the manner of Strauss, as its standard-bearer. What an England captain cannot do, however, is behave as though it does not exist. Pietersen’s period in office – to his own hurt and bewilderment, but to no one else’s great surprise – was short, and terminated in the squalid and underhand manner with which the panjandrums of English cricket have customarily effected their assassinations.

Nothing, though, became KP’s captaincy more than the manner of his leaving it. He swallowed the humiliation of his reduction to the ranks, did not let the bruises show, and buckled down to serve his replacement. Although his batting temporarily suffered, he never blamed this mild slump in his form on the loss of the captaincy. Soon enough, he had become under Strauss what he had previously been under Vaughan and Flintoff: the linchpin of England’s top order. The player renowned for his arrogance had revealed a hitherto unsuspected characteristic: forbearance.

The entire debacle of Pietersen’s period as captain was one in the finest tradition of English cricket: a farce fit to set the shades of Lord Hawke and Douglas Jardine cracking wintry smiles. KP is nothing, though, if not a quintessentially 21st-century figure, and the second debacle in which he took a starring role was an altogether more cutting-edge affair. How fitting, and how tragic, that the England batsman who more than any other outsoars the dead weight of the past should have ended up on the rack as the result of something as of the moment as a spoof Twitter account. His team-mates found it hilarious. Pietersen found their hilarity painfully upsetting. The resulting culture clash very nearly destroyed his career.

Even dropped from the England team, though, Pietersen remained box-office. The details of the scandal made it the first great cricketing drama of the social media age. Quarrels over IPL contracts, texts to the South African dressing-room, apologies posted on YouTube: EW Swanton must have been spinning in his grave. As has been the case throughout Pietersen’s career, though, everything that is most modern about him co-exists with qualities that would have been perfectly familiar to Campbell. Heroes pass through ordeals that then make their exploits glitter all the more brightly.

It is for that reason that Pietersen’s heroism has never blazed to more brilliant or admirable effect than it did in the winter of 2012, in the second Test against India at Mumbai. The pressure on him walking out to the wicket on the second day would surely have made any other batsman crack. His technique in the first Test had been found grievously wanting: no less an expert than Bishan Bedi had declared that he would never score any runs against the Indian spinners.

His position as England’s leading batsman meant that the failure of the top order in the previous Test was bound to weigh on him to a peculiar degree. Above all, of course, there was the need to demonstrate to his team-mates, and to a dubious and divided cricketing public, that England needed him, and that he needed England. Reintegration can rarely have seemed such a challenge.

Naturally, Pietersen rose to it. His disdainful flick for six off Pragyan Ojha, the shot of his entire peerless innings, would never have provided such an adrenaline rush of pure pleasure had there never been the KP Genius Twitter account. Like Achilles, the great Greek hero who fell out with his team-mates, sulked in his tent while the Trojans put them to the sword, and then returned to action in a golden blaze of glory, Pietersen illustrates a timeless truth: heroes are worth the trouble. Without them how much drabber and less colourful the world would be.