You weigh Kevin Pietersen’s game by the memories you are left with

It was Richie Benaud’s rule that “if you can add to what’s on the screen do it, otherwise shut up”. But even he made exceptions. In July 2005, Benaud was covering the second morning of the first Test in that Ashes series. The day was half an hour old, England were 101 for eight, and Glenn McGrath was bowling. So of course the ball was back of a length, just outside off. The batsman swished his hips to the left, spread his feet, swung the bat flat and fast, and crashed the ball back past McGrath’s ankles for four. It wasn’t a cut or drive but something else again. Cricket didn’t have the vocabulary for it. It wasn’t in the dictionary, let alone the MCC manual.

Benaud waited 10 seconds, then, lingering over each syllable, said simply: “That was a very, very good strike.” Well, never tell the viewer what they can see for themselves. But Benaud couldn’t help it, as if he needed to talk us through it just to reassure himself, and everyone else, that it had really happened. McGrath cocked an eyebrow, curled his lip, tried to hide his wild surprise. He had been playing Ashes cricket for a decade but no English batsman had ever hit him quite like Kevin Pietersen just did. It was the sixth boundary Pietersen scored in Test cricket. He followed it with a seventh, then an eighth, and his first Test 50.

Pietersen announced his retirement with a single tweet last Friday evening. “Boots up! Feet up!” It was a damp squib of a finish for a Ringling showman – but then his last job was well away from the big top. He was in Sharjah, playing for Quetta Gladiators in the PSL.

He made seven, was caught off the inside edge trying to whip a ball from outside off. The bowler, Faheem Ashraf, was five when Pietersen made his senior debut, for KwaZulu-Natal back in 1999. Pietersen didn’t get a bat in that first match. But he made up for it after, with 30,329 runs and 68 centuries in all cricket.

Those are statistical shillings and pence. There is a new generation of Moneyball analysts looking for better measures of a batsman’s value but what metrics tell you about Pietersen’s achievements? How do you quantify the extravagance of his talent, chart the radical shock of watching him hit those shots? You weigh Pietersen’s game by the memories you are left with, the moments you can still see in your mind when you close your eyes. Pietersen made more of those than any other postwar English player but for Ian Botham and Denis Compton.

Seven weeks after that first 50, Pietersen made his seminal 158 at the Oval, the highlight those three overs from Brett Lee, when however hard and fast he seemed to bowl, Pietersen simply hit him away harder and faster still. It was the high-water mark in modern English cricket, a first Ashes victory in 18 years, in the very last Test match ever played on free-to-air TV. The game would never be so popular again. “Some of the greatest batting I have ever seen in a Test match,” said Benaud, a Test match Tiresias, who had seen it all, known it all, in his 50 years.

At Edgbaston the next year, Pietersen switched his stance and reverse-swept Muttiah Muralitharan for six over cover point. Two years later, in a one-day game at the Riverside against New Zealand, he played those first two switch hits. They left the bowler scratching his head and everyone else debating whether or not the laws needed to be rewritten to legislate for Pietersen’s gifts. He was still young and dumb back then, and the circuit was full of Salieris, men who could not fathom his talent, or square it with his tattoos and hairdos. His short captaincy, and its embarrassing end, was their revenge.

That changed him. Afterwards he sometimes seemed to be batting in spite of English cricket rather than in service to it, as if he felt the only thing left to prove was how wrong everyone else was.

There were still those moments, though. In 2010 he played an eight-ball duel with Dale Steyn at Bridgetown in the World T20, which seemed to raise the format into a higher realm. He won: four, dot, four, four, six, dot, four, one. There was his 227 against Australia at Adelaide and his flawless 186 in Mumbai, signature innings in epochal series. And his “it’s not easy being me” masterpiece, 149 against South Africa at Headingley.

Everyone will have their own. I would add his unbeaten triple century for Surrey against Leicestershire at the Oval in 2015, the first 291 of which came in a single day when the opposition set all nine men back on the boundary, the better to watch the ball fly into the stands.

And that short film he made in 2014. Driving through Dubai, he stopped the car so he could join in with a locals’ scratch match on some scrubland. He grabbed the bat, thrashed a six to the distant horizon, said: “Thanks boys” and strolled off, leaving the bewildered players wondering who was going to go to fetch the ball back.

Pietersen never did seem to quite figure out how to play well with others. Even now he sometimes seems more worried about how people are treating animals than he does about how he is treating people. But Pietersen embodied the idea that cricket is an individual game masquerading as a team sport. Of course not everyone sees it his way – but then with Pietersen, they never did.