“We actually got on better professionally than most other people because we were honest with each other,” he told Sky Sports. “We openly disliked each other, but we wanted each other in the team. I wanted a Kevin Pietersen who was scoring runs because he was simply one of the best in the world.”

“There weren’t discernible cliques,” he said. “We’re a team who got to No.1 in the world, and within a team there are always going to be individuals… 99 per cent of that team were very much in it for the team as well. What we ended up having with Kevin was a situation where he’d been captain before, and he definitely didn’t like the establishment and rules, much like me. We were actually very similar in many ways, me and Kev.”