Team spirit

The fall-out from Kevin Pietersen's new book is all a bit depressing, if predictable, and while I doubt very much that he's telling the whole story, I think it's also probably safe to assume that there's at least some truth in what he alleges about the culture within the England dressing-room.

If so, it raises questions about the management of the England set-up - not so much the coach, but those above him. If there really was a culture of bullying, then they're the ones who should have identified it and stamped it out.

If it was a cliquey culture of certain senior players lording it over the rest, well, that's a bit different. It's probably not ideal, but it's also probably no different to every other sports team, professional and amateur, around the world. Team spirit is, if not exactly overrated, certainly very different to how it is usually painted. In any team, you're going to have players who don't get along, who openly dislike each other, even. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that they're able to put that behind them while they're on the field, and play for the team. Look at Shane Warne, in the great Australian team he played in. He never bought into the visible team-bonding exercises, openly mocked the coach at times, and fell out with more than one captain. It didn't stop him playing at his best, and helping the team to play at their best. I once played in a local league team in which, the season we won the league, our two key players loathed each other off the field. On it, they put that aside and won game after game for us (one was a bowler, the other a wicket-keeper).

This is where KP's story falls down a bit, too. His villain of the piece, Matt Prior, might very well be all or some of the things he alleges off the field, but on it he was always a notably unselfish player. Maybe KP should simply have got on with it.

Equally, though, English cricket has a bad record of accommodating anyone out of the ordinary. While KP has predecessors in the 'too selfish' camp (Boycott, I hear you cry), we've also tended to mistrust the eccentric (Derek Randall), the slightly rotund (Mark Ealham, Samit Patel), the hard-headed professional (Brian Close), and the apparently (but not really) too laid-back (David Gower, Tom Graveney). Maybe English cricket, too, needs to learn to just get on with it.