Pietersen's brush strokes from nowhere

KP on adrenaline © Getty Images

The late, demented Hunter S Thompson once said: "A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony, with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums."

Not for a moment am I endorsing the use of illegal drugs, or the abuse of conventional ones - especially in such an esteemed organ as this. But there is clearly a link between higher influences and the liberating of creative genius. Among hundreds of artists we have enjoyed drugged-up, plain plastered or simply pixilated, William Blake, Amedeo Modigliani, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas and John Lennon. Pertinent to this parish there is Kevin Pietersen.

Before elderly readers choke on their gin, I should point out the juice that helped Pietersen fly so freely on the Friday of the second Test against Sri Lanka at Edgbaston is legal and available to all of us. The big man was running on pure adrenaline.

Pietersen was `pumped,' as the Australians say. He was `zonking on the gord', as Hunter S might have put it - and all around him must have seemed a phantasmagorical mix of the tranquil and the furious.

Which is no use at all, of course, if you are not `focused'. Or `in the zone', to use the tired argot of the life coaches and other trend whores. So in control was he for nearly all of his innings that whatever inhibitions he has (and there do not look to be many) could not contain his audacity. In this heightened state of super-control he was able to play a cornucopia of outrageous strokes, ones his peers would not dare try. Few batsmen can have harnessed the rush to such spectacular effect.

At the apex of his 142 in that first innings, however, was the impossible-to-forget switch-hit swat for six off Muttiah Muralitharan. It has drawn overblown praise and some mild criticism. Alone among his contemporaries Pietersen is not only capable of thinking of such an outrageous shot against the leading international wicket-taker in the history of the game but actually doing it. In one shot he brought together the highest degree of technical skill (picking the length early, swapping his hands on the handle, swinging his right leg forward, then lifting the ball over the ropes from the centre of the bat) with invention for which there was no answer. It was like Sonny Liston's left jab, a Pete Sampras ace: there was just no answer to it.

When Murali is reduced to perplexed mortal it is fair to assume we are witnessing something very unusual. This is not cricket as we know it. It is intuitive art, a brush stroke from nowhere. Yet within a couple of deliveries Pietersen was back in the hutch and England were setting in train an old-fashioned collapse. Five wickets for five runs.

So was that single sweep, as Mike Atherton said at the time, possibly the most audacious shot ever seen in a Test match in England - or, as Steve James saw it, a rush of blood, a precursor to self-destruction and not the work of a selfless and responsible team man? Writing in The Guardian, James stepped back to analyse the shot that shook up the summer. And his judgement was scathing. "The man of the match," he said, "might easily have lost England the match." In a way, he is right. England did subsequently let Sri Lanka back into the game, just as they had in the first Test at Lord's, and there were moments on the Saturday, as Michael Vandort was fashioning the most patient of fightbacks, when England were riding on their nerves again. James reckons the adrenaline got to Pietersen. The player himself conceded: "It was naughty" - spoken like the hardened pro he is trying to become instead of a mere thrashing maverick.

But what a shame it would be if Pietersen abandoned his wilder instincts. How unfortunate if he went from hurricane to light drizzle. What a loss not just to England's cause but to the game itself. It is just such brilliance, inadvisable in the circumstances or not, that has saved cricket from its extended time in the shadows of football. Have we forgotten last summer already? I know elite sport is about discipline and dedication, hard work and application. But, sport is also part struggle, part theatre. The frailties of even the best complete the drama. (The selectors dropped Bradman. Once - but dropped him nonetheless.) Among the giants of cricket, those that live most vividly in the memory have not been the accumulators, the steely grinders. They have been those wonderful chancers who strive for something new and exciting. Otherwise we would still be bowling lobs and stopping cover drives with our feet. We would not be witness to four runs an over in Tests, impossible scores in Twenty20, diving stops in the outfield, wrong 'uns and doosras, reverse swing and the reverse sweep.

Take Pietersen's daring away and, sadly, there might not be much left underneath. He goes where his talent takes him. Generally he plays with intelligence and selectivity. If he occasionally loses it, it is a piddling price to pay. When the going gets weird, the weird get hundreds.