Pietersen plays his finest innings

Kevin Pietersen has done the professional sportsman a service. The weightless banalities that routinely spill from their mouths are the bane of the reporter's life and do little to promote our understanding of them or their world, writes Kevin Garside in the Telegraph.

Why shouldn't Pietersen confess his homesickness? That is not weakness. If it were he could not have raced to 4000 Test runs quicker than any bar The Don. Professionalism does not result in emotional lobotomies. Sportsmen still bleed like the rest of us and ten weeks away from home is no holiday no matter which Caribbean beach you are standing on.