KP axed as Cook must have trust in team: ECB

Reuters/London

The controversial batsman’s England career was ended earlier this month when he was left out of the squad for the upcoming World Twenty20 in Bangladesh and the preceding tour of the West Indies. “The England team needs to rebuild after the whitewash in Australia,” the ECB said in a statement yesterday.

“To do that we must invest in our captain Alastair Cook and we must support him in creating a culture in which we can be confident he will have the full support of all players, with everyone pulling in the same direction and able to trust each other.  It is for those reasons we have decided to move on without Kevin Pietersen.”

Pietersen lost England’s trust, says Strauss

Meanwhile, former captain Andrew Strauss also said that Pietersen’s England career was ended because of a total loss of trust between him and the team’s management.

Strauss believes it was the inevitable consequence of a breakdown in trust. “Without trust, the team environment is stillborn,” he wrote in British newspaper the Sunday Times.

“It is for this reason that Kevin Pietersen’s international career had to be brought to an end. The media have been searching for a ‘smoking gun’. Everyone is looking for disciplinary problems, bust-ups and character clashes, but they are looking for the wrong thing. The smoking gun is the total absence of trust.”

Strauss identified Pietersen’s dismissal as England captain five years ago as the beginning of the breakdown. He also said that efforts to reintegrate the South Africa-born batsman into the team after he was found to have sent derogatory text messages about Strauss to opposition players were “a little like marriage counselling”.

“His relationship with English cricket has been like an illicit affair. Full of thrills and excitement, but destined to end in tears.”