Back in 2008, English cricket belonged to Kevin Pietersen, a mercurial outsider, and Dean Wilson loved every minute of it.

Let’s call it the year of the KP. It was a midpoint four years after Kevin Pietersen’s England debut and six years before his international career came to a juddering halt and even though cricket is a team game, his career arc is a thing of perplexing beauty.

There have been other players during this period who have done incredible things and made huge contributions, but for the 10 years that Pietersen was an England player, no man had a greater influence or polarised opinion more than him and I found it utterly fascinating.

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It was my sixth summer covering the England team but my second as the Daily Mirror correspondent. There was no hint of the jaded hack, I was still full of youthful enthusiasm about the team I was following, and as the summer began to unravel, there was a genuine hope that Pietersen might just take England singing and dancing into another glorious period of success, at least that is how it looked at the time.

I was still buzzing from the tour to New Zealand when I reported for duty back at Lord’s for the first Test of the summer. It truly is the most stunning country and a joy to visit, especially when you can cover almost all of it by road amid the scenery. So when the warm and friendly Kiwis arrived in the UK for round two, it almost felt as though the tour had simply continued.

Maybe I was in a sauvignon blanc inspired perma-haze which is why I remember it so fondly, but it was just a happy time. I had moved in with my girlfriend, now wife, and I was doing a job that I loved deeply.

The seeds had been sown by my Bajan father many years ago and it felt like I was reaping the benefits.

Just a few weeks earlier Brendon McCullum had swapped me a tennis racket for a beer fridge after a golf tournament near Christchurch, on the basis that I might struggle to get the beer fridge in my luggage, and he made a point of shouting me a couple of frosty ones when we met in a bar in Manchester ahead of the second Test. Life was good.

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I felt like I belonged and I was part of something cool, and the way Pietersen played the game was a big part of that. He made the game fun and entertaining. Cricket seemed less stuffy when KP was involved and that was a good thing.

England went on to win the next two matches to take the series with Pietersen scoring a match-winning 115 at Trent Bridge.

He had of course given us all a taste of his outrageous talent – be it on his debut one-day tour to Zimbabwe and South Africa in front of a hostile crowd, or at the Oval in the 2005 Ashes which announced him as a superstar, and in 2006 he first unveiled the switch-hit that was to become his trademark shot by taking on Muttiah Muralitharan in a way that no England player had dared since 1998.

And yet in 2008 he produced two shots that were to stun the opposition, the crowd and all those watching on TV in a way that only he could.

The image of Pietersen, not once but twice, switch-hitting Scott Styris over cow-corner – or was it extra cover? – for two monstrous sixes has become part of cricket folklore, as too the response from the bowler. A scratch of the chin, a rueful smile and the knowledge that he had not only been beaten, but he had been scarred. This was life-affirming stuff.

By the time the Test series against South Africa came around Pietersen was batting as well as he ever had and it showed with a brilliant 152 at Lord’s, his first Test against his country of birth. I wondered about it and wrote about it at the time. It must have been a bizarre but exhilarating feeling for him.

[caption id=”attachment_149199″ align=”alignnone” width=”800″] “Smile and shrug, Scotty!” Pietersen unleashed two gigantic switch-hits off Scott Styris at Chester-le-Street[/caption]

Pietersen, who loves South Africa the place to his core, but feels spurned enough to move abroad and try and make a go of cricket elsewhere. He finds it hard to reconcile the decision he has made so he lashes out and engages in a war of words with the likes of Graeme Smith over the issue, calling him an “absolute muppet”. It is why he is so reviled when he goes back for the first time and is booed to high heaven. He takes it and responds this time with the bat and not the mouth – it feels good.

Now here he is at the home of cricket, the place where you make history, and he is doing it against the team he would have hoped to have played for a few years previously.

It is this sense of identity that fascinates me, in the way that you’d expect as the son of West Indian parents who taught me to cheer on the Windies, but who cheered on England against every other team. Torn loyalties that become a win-win because you can’t lose!

[caption id=”attachment_149200″ align=”alignnone” width=”800″] Pietersen scored a match-winning hundred in his first Test as captain[/caption]

As the world gets smaller it becomes increasingly difficult to be certain of your identity if you or your family moves from one place to another, and yet it is that firm idea of who you are and where you come from that enables you to find your way in someplace new.

I guess it’s hard enough trying to live and work in a new land when no-one is watching, let alone when you’re doing it in front of thousands studying your every move.

And yet it is out in the middle in the heat of the battle where I think Pietersen is most at home and feels most secure. It is all so simple in the middle, you just have to score runs and that is all you’re judged on.

“I started to think to myself, ‘I’ve got one innings here.’”

Pietersen on the pressure on him ahead of the second innings of the final Test of the 2005 Ashes. https://t.co/1v0Od3NqNE

— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) May 10, 2020

Off the field you’re judged on what you look like, what you sound like, where you’re from, who you know and who you don’t know. You are pre-judged.

The series continues with Smith and his team dominating in Leeds in what we shall call the ‘Pattinson Affair’ and then again at Edgbaston when Pietersen holes out for 94 and ends an innings that might well have saved the game. So at 2-0 down with one to play the series is over as a contest and so too is Vaughan’s captaincy.

Enter stage left the new captain of England in every format going. The outsider is now at the helm of the establishment and he is promising to do it his way. I am swept along by his positive messages before the final Test at the Oval and think that perhaps this single-minded, selfish player will use those traits for the good of the team. He talks a good game, and he plays a good game, scoring a hundred in a six-wicket win, but that is as good as it gets.

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A terrorism-influenced tour to India later and it is all over, he is stripped of the captaincy while Peter Moores is sacked as coach and the huge schism that remains between Pietersen and the ECB to this day is created.

I think Pietersen actually had his happiest moment as an England player in 2008, as captain raising his bat for that hundred against South Africa at the Oval. It certainly looked that way to me. I know I had a great time watching it.

First published in 2016.