Who needs a litany of Pietersen's complaints?

To read Kevin Pietersen's book KP: The Autobiography is to be filled with sympathy. I never thought I would feel that way. It had initially seemed that all the faults were on the one side, but now I am filled with wondrously compassionate feelings about the England and Wales Cricket Board and everyone connected with the England team.

That's the problem with (a) score-settling and (b) egomania. Both tend to alienate sympathy. And oh! the sensitivity of the fundamentally insensitive man. Pietersen could - and did - drive a mechanical flail through the England team without being aware that anyone was inconvenienced, but should he suffer the pricking of a pin he's awake all night weeping.

This is a borderline unreadable book. Can't blame the ghost, David Walsh: how could anyone make 315 pages of bleating into a convincing narrative? Apparently they're all bastards. Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!

But the strange event is not the falling-out that the book celebrates. The miracle was that it lasted for nine years. Never mind who's to blame: we should be on our knees giving thanks for what we actually got - and that holds good whether you cheer for England or anyone else.

Say you're a Holly or a Bollywood producer and you're making a film. No matter how big the star and how temperamental the director, you know a film is a team thing. But you still get Mozart to write the music. You know you'll get trouble, because Mozart is like that. Quite a lot of people will end up hating him: bloody WM, we'd be better off without him. You'll probably vow never to employ him again. But your film will be blessed with the sweetest music anyone ever wrote: so you're ahead on the deal. You've won.

What's a cricket team for? What's any sporting team all about? Is it a club of like-minded fellows? A group of dear old pals? Is it all about happiness? Or the expression of certain agreed virtues? Or is it about pursuing victory - and by implication excellence - with every resource at your disposal?

The England cricket team was lucky enough to get hold of a cricketing Mozart. He came as an émigré and a mercenary. England wanted his runs, he wanted the opportunity to make them, and the proper reward for doing so. It was a deal: the best kind of business, in which both parties walk away feeling like winners. At any rate at first.

The whole KP business would have been worth it for just three innings, and I was there for all of them. Let's take 'em in reverse order. In Mumbai, with England already one Test down, he scored 186 on a turning wicket; England went on to win the series. In Adelaide in 2010, he scored 227 as England set off towards complete domination of the Ashes series. And in 2005, with England about to lose to Australia at The Oval and so fail to win the Ashes, he changed everything with an innings of thunderous insanity, scoring 158. Pietersen was worth all the trouble for that innings alone, as Mozart was worth all the trouble for just the Coronation Mass.

This is where truth is found in sport: in deeds, in victories, in defeats. I don't believe a word of Pietersen's book, but then I don't believe a word anyone else has said either. What matters is that Pietersen, with England falling apart as they played for a draw, launched one of the most thrilling counter-assaults in cricketing history and went for the Australian enforcer, Brett Lee, like a starving man-eater.

It was an innings that had everything: the joys of partisanship (for I am English), the drama of a single player taking hold of a team event and changing its course utterly, and the unalloyed excellence of a sporting performer at the very peak of his powers doing something that few others would have dared even to dream about. That was what Pietersen did best: he was the great transformer. He changed the course of matches and of series.

All that stuff gets hardly a mention in the book, and all that stuff is precisely the point of Kevin Pietersen. It's like reading a book about all the rows Mozart had with employers and performers, one in which music gets only mentioned here and there - and then mostly as a bridge between injustices.

So who has failed? A team is supposed to do everything it can to be the best it can. By definition, then, a team must embrace difficult individuals as well as good team men. The abiding principle is that any team should be able to bring the best from any individual: and that any failure to do so is a failure shared by all.

If you decide that you're better off without your best player, then has one person failed? Or ten? Or all 11? Or everybody in the squad, or everybody in the entire organisation? And of course, England weren't better off without Pietersen: a series defeat against Sri Lanka was followed by a hideous collapse against India.

Do you know whose fault it was? I can tell you. It was Mitchell Johnson's fault. Johnson bowled so fast and so well for Australia last winter that all England's macho pretensions were exposed for bluster. The team fell apart. What was acceptable in Pietersen in victory became intolerable in defeat - even though he was England's leading run scorer. So they sacked him. Rather than sacking the other ten.

So the score-settling has now got into its stride and with his book, Pietersen has reduced himself to the stature of a pygmy. Still, no one else looks any better. And I, who remember The Oval and Adelaide and Mumbai, grow weary. A line of Bob Dylan winds itself through my mind and subtly distorts: