Kevin Petersen has reignited his old battle with his former captain Andrew Strauss in his support for the current beleaguered captain Joe Root.
“I feel dreadfully sorry for Joe Root. He’s captaining a form of the game that Strauss & co ruined in 2015! Test Cricket should be the pinnacle, but Strauss/Morgan are somehow the hero’s ? Like I keep saying, the system is broken & so are the journos who are discrediting Joe!There is a much bigger picture here too. Joe is captaining players for longer periods of time under the strictest bubbles. The pressure in Tests mentally is way more,” Petersen tweeted.
Petersen vs Strauss saga dates back to the 2012 Test series against South Africa, when Petersen, who had already lost his captaincy after run-ins with the England Cricket Board, had sent text messages to South African players that allegedly insulted Strauss. Petersen was dropped after the “Text-gate’ scandal and though he was later reintegrated into the side, his career slowly grinned to a halt after the 2013-14 Ashes which England lost 0-5 under Alastair Cook.
Last April, in a podcast of Sky Sports, Strauss admitted he had made a “mistake” in handling Petersen, while also laying his side of the story.
“I probably didn’t do enough work with KP. There came a time when some of the people he was close with in the team retired or got dropped. There was an opportunity there, not necessarily to bring him in, but spend a lot more time with him and make sure his views were valued and considered,” Strauss said. “I think instead I just let KP be KP. In retrospect, that was a mistake and might have sowed the seeds for what was to come down the track.”
In his autobiography in 2014, Petersen had alleged that there was a bullying culture within the team. He had alleged that the wicket-keeper Matt Prior and seniors like James Anderson, Stuart Broad and Grade Swan would force team-mates to apologize for midfield and dropped catches during matches. His claims were denied by Prior and Swan.
Grade Smith, former South Africa’s captain, had jumped in defense of Petersen. “Having played against them, we always used to say if we could get a win or get ahead, that they would turn on each other. A lot of the stuff that he’s touched on in his book, the bullying stuff, you certainly did experience some of it when you played against them, and you knew you could use it as an asset to get on the other side of them.”
In his version, last year, Strauss talked about how Petersen had slowly started to drift away from his team-mates. “Often KP wanted to be the guy who was slightly separate from the team. On any given day it didn’t feel like an issue, but over time it became an issue.
“Would I do things massively differently if I had my time again? Probably not. The worst thing you can do for players like KP is to straitjacket them and say ‘you have to abide by x, y and z. You can’t go and play in a flamboyant way, you have to grind it out like Jonathan Trot.”
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