So here it is then. Boom! KP: The Autobiography is finally upon us and what a hugely entertaining, endlessly quotable, white-knuckle score-settling exercise it turns out to be, though in keeping with Kevin Pietersen’s own boom-or-bust career as a cricketer the book runs into trouble as early as the second and third words of its title. This is not, it turns out, an autobiography at all. It is instead a score-settling exercise, a mea non culpa, the sound of an argument happening very loudly through the wall.
Mainly KP: The Autobiography is the next stage in a very public tussle that will no doubt take another turn within the next few days when the ECB responds formally to the accusations of bullying within the England dressing room; when the senior players taken to task here get round to mustering up some kind of small arms response; and most intriguingly of all when Matt Prior, the Big Cheese, has time to sit down and decide what the Big Cheese is going to do about the Big Cheese’s portrayal in these pages (sample quote: “the Big Cheese has earned some beer tonight!”) as, if not the most hilariously objectionable popinjay ever to play international cricket, then perhaps the worst yet. The Big Cheese is not going to like this. No. The Big Cheese is not going to like this one bit.
There are elements of standard autobiography here. Some childhood stuff about schools and parents and backyard cricket crops up after 50 pages or so of amphetamine-grade score-settling. But this, of course, is not the game. Instead Pietersen and his ghost writer, the excellent David Walsh, have produced a Red Bull-powered T20 run chase of a book that uses the word “I” 18 times in its first 180 words, starts off with a full, frank, entirely one-track description of the reasons it is being written in the first place (KP’s sacking by England after the disastrous winter Ashes tour) and does not let up for the 300 pages that follow.
There are, of course, some problems with this. KP: The Autobiography presents itself as the first genuinely open, unblinkered version of a series of events that have proved horribly rancorous and upsetting for those who love English cricket and English cricketers and who treasure the sport as a spectacle.
But there is too much at stake here for that in a book that reads at times like an affidavit, a prosecution statement, a bid for historic blame-aversion. “I think that me confronting mediocrity throughout my career has earned me this reputation for being destructive. Some people don’t like hearing the truth,” Pietersen concludes at one point.
And if the tone is almost entirely solipsistic – things keep happening to me because so many of the people I come into contact with are bad – then let’s face it most of his adversaries give him a helping hand. Making Paul Downton sound like a good old chap in a nice suit handed the top job by Friends Reunited is not hard to do, and Pietersen’s suggestion, post-Ashes apocalypse, that “a clique choked our team” is far more convincing than Downton’s rather bizarre notion that the problem was KP looking “disinterested” in Sydney: did he not see Stuart Broad bat on that final day?
Making the ECB, with its 50-point dossier of grievances, look ridiculous: not hard either. Making Andy Flower look punitive and overly intense. Making the Big Cheese (“a Dairylea triangle thinking he’s Brie”) look like a wearisome banter-monkey. Also not hard. But does all this make KP look any better?
By way of a recap, that bile again in full. Stuart Broad – “not the sharpest tool in the box” – gets off lightly enough. Andrew Strauss is respected but also portrayed as a deluded, fogeyish figure. Talking to him about the IPL is like “speaking to the vicar about gangsta rap”. Alastair Cook “hates conflict” and is “like Ned Flanders from The Simpsons”.
Prior, meanwhile, is “the schoolyard bully who is also the teacher’s pet”, and most vividly “a guy who calls himself the Big Cheese strutting around the dressing room showing off his new clothes and telling everyone about the amazing nights out he has”.
In many ways the nub of the book – and more importantly the events behind it – is Pietersen’s relationship with Flower, the Darth Vader of these pages. “Andy Flower, contagiously sour, infectiously dour,” KP writes. Elsewhere Flower is described as “The Mood Hoover”, “vinegar puss” and “fucking horrendous”. There is a serious point to be made here. Flower is a brilliant cricket coach but also a phenomenally intense human being, one of those rootless citizens of the cricketing world who pilot the lycra-juggernaut of professional sport like a personalised global Winnebago. There is a discussion to be had about the debilitating, transformative effects of all this on individuals and on sport generally. Not now, though. Not here. Fucking horrendous it is.
The accusations of bullying are distressing, and ring true enough. “Swanny was the extrovert, the loudmouth. He was also the one who picked on players,” Pietersen writes, before describing his own retreat into silence and despair over the KP genius – funny at first; spiteful before long – Twitter account, which ends up with him bursting into tears in front of Flower.
He is illuminating, and also salutary on the IPL and English distaste for it generally. Albeit at this point the book again starts to sound like something else. Pietersen often accuses the “politicians” at the ECB of having “exit strategies” but in many ways that is exactly what this book is. His own distaste for English administrators, county cricket and the English press is very clear. His overtures to South Africa are fair enough, if a little mawkish and pointed. The overt declarations of affection for the bountiful pre-and post retirement fields of india feels a little ill-timed in here. Exit strategies. Maybe it is good to have one after all.
Above all two things stand out. First, there is a wonderful cricket book in here that has not on this occasion been written. There are one or two moments where the pulse quickens: the description of that reverse sweep for six off Muttiah Muralitharan in 2006; a full two-page email from Rahul Dravid on playing spin (there’s the book: right there. Actually forget that, let’s make a film); and most vivid of all memories of the way Mitchell Johnson’s opening spell destroyed England’s spirit in the winter.
“Boom the first ball from Johnson hits Trotty on the glove as he jumps back and tries to shield his face … a shudder ran through the dressing room … Lunch, no thanks. I was sitting there thinking: I could die here in the fucking Gabbatoir”.
And secondly what leaps out is the sheer brain-mangling claustrophobia and tedium of the modern-day international cricketer’s life. “We are on the road for 250 days a year, we wear our England kit on most of these days … It never, ever ended.”
This is an unnatural state of affairs. Human beings are not designed for it. Things will, of course, get broken along the way. Right now English cricket is still kicking through the wreckage.
KP: The Autobiography is published by Sphere and will be on sale from Thursday
