Eyes front as South Africa's 'lost' son is back for the IPL

This week, apologies in advance: if you're sick of reading about Kevin Pietersen, you have this column's sympathy. But a chat with his temporary coach, Ray Jennings of the Bangalore Royal Challengers, has persuaded us that - in the week the Indian Premier League begins here in South Africa - the latest chapter in the Pietersen parable is just too good to ignore.English cricket is always flagellating itself for being soft and taking the easy option. It's one reason - that, and the weather - for the silly number of draws in the county championship (the figure for non-abandoned matches in 2008 was a snoozeworthy 53%). And yet English cricket remains stupidly suspicious of immodest excellence. Enter Pietersen, a man who takes hard options and knows he's good. It makes him gloriously unEnglish. The task he is about to undertake with the Bangalore Royal Challengers just about sums him up.Think about it for a moment. Pietersen is returning to a country where voluble sections of the crowd regard him as a traitor. He will be captaining two men - Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher - who probably have their own views on his decision to leave South Africa. He will be playing for a coach who revels in his straight-talking toughness (yesterday, he told us Pietersen "doesn't score enough runs") and for an owner - the whisky, airline and F1 magnate Vijay Mallya - whose expectations of success are such that last year he sacked his chief executive mid-tournament. What does he think this is? Football?There's more. Pietersen will do the job for two weeks only, thus setting himself up for further accusations of being a mercenary, and his first game will be against Shane Warne, who used to regard him as a close friend but now thinks him "weird" and will do everything he possibly can to make him look a dummy. His second game? That's against Andrew Flintoff, the bloke who denies having anything to do with his downfall as England captain. And all this after he admitted to the Daily Mail that he was "at the end of his tether" in the Caribbean and wanted to go home.Parts of the scenario are of his own making and few will have much sympathy when his pro-rata earnings from a headline fee of $1.55m would be enough to buy a second-division centre-back. But the potential pratfalls are so many that you wonder about the sanity of an already very rich man in going along for the ride.There are a few explanations. Money is one, and let's not pretend otherwise. Ego is another, although Pietersen's famous self-regard is no more intact than that of certain other members of the England team: he's just more honest about it. A desire to show the England and Wales Cricket Board that he can thrive as a captain, however briefly, must have come into the equation.Then there's the notion of excellence, a simple enough idea that is easy to miss when the Pietersen peripherals are obscuring your vision. If the switch-hit symbolises his penchant for pushing himself that bit further, he also regards the IPL as an opportunity for English batsmen to catch up with Indians, Australians and South Africans. And he does so with a ruthless simplicity: "It's important for our players to learn how to hit fours and sixes," he said last month. "You can do that in Twenty20 cricket and you can practise it. You must practise it in order to play it." It was no surprise to learn that Pietersen, scheduled to arrive in Johannesburg this morning, had asked Jennings to organise an immediate net session.Lots could go wrong for Pietersen in the next couple of weeks. Lots of people here in South Africa certainly hope so. Failing that, he'll probably improve spectacularly on a Twenty20 record of three fifties in 29 innings. Either way - and regardless of your thoughts on the IPL - you have to admit the Pietersen parable is worth watching.