Kevin Pietersen and how England will live to regret what might have been

“The point is that England played around him – he was England,” says Mike Bechet, Kevin Pietersen’s former coach at Martizburg College. “He was the go-to guy, he was the foundation around which everyone else batted. You guys have never replaced him. You have (Ben) Stokes now but he still has a long way to go before he can catch up with KP. I think English cricket will live to regret the way it treated him.”

Like him or loathe him, it’s a hard opinion to argue against. In 104 Tests, Pietersen scored 8181 runs at an average of over 47 and after playing his final Test against the Aussies in January 2014 his absence left a KP-sized hole that England haven’t come close to filling.

Bechet was instrumental in developing Pietersen’s early game on sun-baked pitches in Kwa-Zulu Natal, and worked with ultimate marmite cricketer before he left South Africa to earn his corn in the English game.

At the time Pietersen was a promising young off-spinner first and batsman second. That, of course, would change pretty rapidly but what didn’t was the attitude that soon saw Pietersen stand-out – for good reason and bad – in the County Championship with Nottinghamshire.

“I don’t care what anyone says – he turned the face of English cricket,” says Bechet. “He turned England from a bunch of blokes who went out and won a few and lost a few but didn’t really know where they were going into a side that said ‘fuck this, this is a business here – let’s get in these okes (a South African term meaning guys or blokes) faces.

“He made English cricket tougher. When I was coaching him as a youngster then – and I don’t mean this disrespectfully – I probably couldn’t see him achieving what he eventually did. Some blokes mature late and I think that was the case with KP.

“When he want to Cannock (in the Birmingham League at the age of 20) and had to suddenly understand that he wasn’t going to make it as an off-break bowler, he worked bloody hard on his batting, got big and strong and the rest is history.”

What he also had was a priceless ability to rub people up the wrong way and as opinion turned on him in South Africa, he was hardly endearing himself to his adopted country either.

A famous spat with Nottinghamshire ended with his bag being turfed off the Trent Bridge pavilion balcony and even when he found himself in contention for an England place there were plenty who couldn’t countenance this supposed South African upstart wearing the Three Lions rather than the Proteas.

It says much about his evolution, particularly in recent years, that the majority of people in the past 24 hours have been singing his praises rather than running him down.

“He’s a determined guy,” says Bechet. “When he left South Africa he moved on. He’s independent, he didn’t want people telling him that he couldn’t do things.

“What you must understand is that South Africans and Australians are actually very similar. They’re quite arrogant and we were quick to criticise Kevin but I think we realised that he was a mirror image of what we’re like here.

“All over Facebook today there’s just positive stuff but when somebody turns his back on his country, a lot of people say ‘f**k that, you mustn’t come back here and score runs’.

“But on the sheer weight of his performances you have to take your hat off and say ‘gees, here’s a guy who has gone out into the absolute wilderness and done incredibly well’. I would say he’ll go down as one of the best English Test cricketers. I don’t think you can argue with that, regardless of where you’re from.”

The great imponderable for those in South Africa is whether he would ever have done for South Africa what he ultimately did for England.

“We’ll never know, will we,” says Bechet. “But if you look at what he did for England you have to believe that he would still have been able to do that in South Africa. I think he developed far more quickly, though, taking the route he eventually took. There will always be a certain disappointment that we missed out on him but I think the major disappointment should lie with English cricket and the way it treated him – not just once but two or three times.”