Audacity and ambiguity

Forty-three, which is the number of runs Kevin Pietersen scored today in Brisbane, is roughly par. It tells us nothing. Yet when a grass-scorching straight drive took Pietersen from six to 10, you sensed the destiny of the Ashes might lie in his hands. A minute later he was swaying down on one knee and throttling a bullet drive towards gully, the most audacious way possible of negotiating a dot ball. That’s when you sensed that he sensed it too.

To go from 13 to 14, Pietersen patted the ball away as softly as his hands could manage, ensuring the fieldsman would take a while to get to it, and started galloping. You knew then that he was thinking, and trying. As he hammered away at the popping crease, his legs were splayed even wider than usual, making an upside-down V. When he covered up in defence he permitted not one glimpse of wood. He looked not simply dangerous – dangerous is Pietersen’s default setting – but assured, as well. If the ball pitched on or near leg stump, he pulled, hooked, glanced, tugged or shovelled it away, sometimes falling forward as he did so. Anything around off stump – anything not wide or overpitched, that is – and he wasn’t interested.

Preparing for cricket is an inexact science. We assume that heaps of preparation is better than some preparation and that some preparation is better than no preparation. But we are guessing. In three warm-up matches, captain Andrew Strauss has squirrelled away every run on offer. This morning, when it actually mattered, he cut the wrong ball at the worst moment and neglected to roll his wrists. Pietersen, against those same warm-up opponents, has dallied just long enough to know he is more or less middling the ball. Today, his shot selection immaculate, he plain-sailed to 39.

At that moment Mitchell Johnson landed consecutive balls roughly in the area where angst resides: short of a length, a foot outside off. Pietersen let them both go. A delicious crossroads was upon us: a battle of patience between two impatient men.

Johnson is Australia’s spearhead. Yet Pietersen has faced him five times in Tests and not yet succumbed. Pietersen is vulnerable to a bowler with a plan. Johnson, alas, is not one for planning. And when Johnson does have a plan, the ball tends not to go where the plan says it’s meant to go. The plan on this occasion was to tempt Pietersen, to keep the same length and land the ball fractionally closer to off stump. Johnson promptly landed it too close and buggered the length up as well. The ball went screeching through the covers.

Peter Siddle is wilier than he is given credit for – that grinning bull-in-a-pen appearance does him few favours – and perhaps he’d been taking notes. For Johnson was taken off and Siddle was straightaway putting the ball where Johnson was supposed to have put it. And just like that, Pietersen was on his way, for 43: an innings that told us nothing, and everything.