Pietersen wants to lead again

29 June 2008

Kevin Pietersen would relish the opportunity to captain England again this summer

Kevin Pietersen hopes to get another chance to captain England this summer following the 51-run defeat to New Zealand at Lord’s.

The result, in Pietersen’s first game in charge of his adopted country, gave New Zealand a 3-1 victory in the NatWest Series.

The batsmen filled in for suspended one-day skipper Paul Collingwood, who will also have to sit out England’s next three limited-overs matches.

That could give Pietersen the opportunity to lead the team against Scotland on August 18 before they face South Africa, the country of his birth, in the NatWest Twenty20 and NatWest Series opener.

“Today was great fun and if I get the opportunity I will do the job like I did today,” said Pietersen.

“The thing for me is I am a perfectionist and I strive on doing things really well, to the best of my ability and being successful.

“Finishing today without a victory gives me an incentive to get the stripes back again, to try to get a victory under the belt.

“I don’t want to be an England captain who captains one game and loses it.”

England got off to a decent start in their pursuit of 267 but, after opening pair Ian Bell and Alastair Cook shared a 53-run opening stand, the middle order did not fire.

And just as has been the case since his majestic hundred in the opening contest, it was the dismissal of Pietersen - he has 23 runs in just four efforts since - which emphasised New Zealand dominance.

“He’s obviously their best batsman, he plays a huge role and when he averages 48 or 49 in one-day cricket which is not heard of too often,” Vettori said.

“So when you get a guy like that out it is not a sense of relief in the camp, it is just things get a little bit easier.

Daniel Vettori holds the NatWest Series trophy aloft

“Whenever you have a marquee player in an opposition, guys always lift to try to get him out.

“You can be deflated with his performance in Durham and it took us a while to react to it.

“But the four games that followed, being able to dismiss him cheaply has had a positive effect on the team.”

Having lost Collingwood to a four-game ban due to a slow over-rate in the Brit Oval defeat in midweek, England raced through the latter stages of the innings - but Pietersen denied he had turned to Owais Shah’s occasional off-spin to avoid further trouble.

“Absolutely no way,” he said. “We were plus one after 15 overs, we were plus two after 30 overs and we remained plus two throughout the whole innings.

“I definitely thought Shah bowled at a time when Jacob Oram had just hit Luke Wright for six over mid-on and I captained how I thought I would be if I was a batter.

“I thought it would be harder for me to hit a spinner than it would be to hit a medium-pacer to areas where I wanted to. That is why I bowled Shah.”

Twice Oram cleared the midwicket rope in Shah’s third and final over and amid a flurry of late boundaries he and Scott Styris both cracked half-centuries to set up a memorable comeback from the thumping in the opener.

“From Edgbaston onwards we’ve played some really good cricket, and to get a result 3-1, as convincingly as that, overseas means you have a pretty happy dressing room,” said Vettori.

“It was good to see half a dozen of our senior guys have stood up at one time or another and been the leading performer.”