Kevin Pietersen Was Probably The Best I've Played With; Could Have Handled Things Differently With Him: Andrew Strauss

Former England skipper Andrew Strauss has hailed his former teammate Kevin Pietersen as the best cricketer he ever played with besides admitting that he could have done things a bit differently during his fallout with the enigmatic batsman.

Andrew Strauss and Kevin Pietersen had a public fallout during the 2012 home summer after Kevin Pietersen sent text messages to South African players during the series.

Pietersen’s career eventually came to an abrupt end following England’s 0-5 mauling in Australia Down Under in 2014/15 following a series of incidents and incidentally Andrew Strauss was the director of England Cricket at the time.

Strauss, however, asserted that he will never absolve Kevin Pietersen for his share of blame in the matter.

“It is always right to ask ourselves the question – could we have managed it differently? Could we have done it better? I definitely feel I could have done a couple of things differently. I definitely would never absolve KP from his share of the blame in everything that went on there. When I look back at it, the vast majority of the time I played cricket with KP was a really happy phase,” Andrew Strauss said on the ‘Headstrong’ podcast.

“He did brilliantly for England. He is a fantastic player, probably the best I ever played with. England got a lot of benefit from it and he got a lot of benefit from it. It was just when the alignment wasn’t there that the issues started coming in,” he said.

Andrew Strauss further that Kevin Pietersen was excellent in his demeanor for a major part of his captaincy tenure and the problems only started to kick in at the backend of his tenure where he felt that Pietersen’s actions didn’t align with the interest of the team.

“For the vast majority of my time captaining KP, he was excellent. Bear in mind, he was removed as England captain and he had run-ins with the ECB and all that stuff. For the most part, he was fine, we got on well. There was a time at the end there where I felt his agenda and the agenda of the team were not aligned,” he said.

”He was trying to do something that was right for him and that was actually detrimental to the team. That was a big issue to me and that’s kind of the background to how everything went wrong in the end,” Stauss further added.

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