The knives are out for Pietersen

Kevin Pietersen's failure on the first day in Trent Bridge is one too many for Henry Blofeld who writes in the Daily Express that the flashy batsman is completely out of form and living on borrowed time in the longest version.

We cannot go on saying Pietersen is a batsman who can change a Test match in a couple of hours. He used to be able to do that but he has not scored a Test hundred in 22 innings since March 2009 in Trinidad.

Nasser Hussain in the Daily Mail blames Pietersen's failure on his lack of match practice ahead of the Test, due to a fractious relationship with his county Hampshire.

Counties should do everything possible to help the England team but Hampshire were within their rights to say last week: ‘Sorry Kev, you have never done anything for us when we needed you, why should we put you in our 40-over team now you need us?’

I was talking to Shane Warne about Pietersen yesterday and he said that he could be as good as anyone in the world, with the exception of Sachin Tendulkar. But he has to remember that when he was scoring lots of hundreds, he was playing regularly. England players are generally overworked these days but Pietersen is undercooked.

Vic Marks in the Guardian writes that Eoin Morgan's century and Ian Bell's form may have the selectors thinking about leaving Pietersen out of the Ashes tour party.

It is a century that puts the cat among the pigeons. Ian Bell, nursing his injured ankle, can only look on from the sidelines, albeit with his stock high. Ravi Bopara is scoring stacks of runs for Essex. And yet England are only likely to pick seven batsmen in their tour party to Australia. After this innings it would be remarkable if Morgan was not one of those.

Surely they could not omit Kevin Pietersen? It remains just about unthinkable but Pietersen was all at sea today. He has been practising assiduously in the nets at Lord's, but that is not the same as scoring runs in the middle in county cricket. The problem is that there appears to be nowhere for him to play county cricket now that his ties with Hampshire are being severed.