The heart of the matter

And here's what you ought to have read on Cricinfo last week.

What does Kevin Pietersen really want? Andrew Miller goes to the heart of the question and finds a simple answer: like a lot of us, he merely wants to be loved.

The countdown to the English summer has begun and we warm up to the job by introducing a weekly column on county cricket, once the nursery for the world game, but now English cricket's favourite scapegoat, by Lawrence Booth, who writes regularly in the Guardian and occasionally on Cricinfo. Booth starts with a lament about the diminishing coverage of domestic cricket in newspapers, but ends with hope. A new saviour is at hand: the web.

Topicality was the last thing on Sidharth Monga's mind when he got Mark Greatbatch to chat about his monumental match-saving innings against Australia in Perth in 1988-89 (655 minutes, 435 balls, 146 not out). But the piece became instantly relevant when Gautam Gambhir put up his own marathon (643 minutes, 436 deliveries, 137 runs) to save India the Napier Test.

And here's a piece that I wish had been published on Cricinfo. Apart from his intellect and rigour, the thing I find most remarkable about Mike Atherton is his ability to look at the time he spent as an English player with dispassionate objectivity. He writes here with candour about his own Lewis Hamilton moment in 1994, when he was fined for lying to the match referee.