Kevin Pietersen is back in England colours. Not in the middle this time, but in the dressing room, with a tracksuit and a mentor’s brief rather than a bat in his hand. And Joe Root, the last active Test player who shared that space with him, insists this is a very different England to the one that pushed Pietersen out a decade ago.
Root was a fresh-faced 22-year-old on that grim 2013-14 Ashes tour which effectively ended Pietersen’s international career. He is captain now, and the landscape around him has shifted.
“The world is a very different place to what it was in 2014, and the England team is in a very different place to that as well,” Root told BBC Sport, as news broke that Pietersen will join the white-ball set-up as a mentor in the build-up to the 2027 World Cup in South Africa.
Pietersen back in the fold
Pietersen’s return is striking for anyone who lived through the fallout. Once the most box-office batter in English cricket, he left the stage under a cloud of acrimony, “trust issues” and text-message rows. Now he walks back into the fold as part of Brendon McCullum’s staff for the white-ball series against Sri Lanka next week, with a longer-term eye on a World Cup in the country of his birth.
Root, who played 12 Tests and nine ODIs alongside Pietersen, knows both sides of the story: the controversy, and the cricketer.
“A lot of the guys will have watched him and got into the game because of him,” he said. “It will be great for those guys to have the opportunity to work alongside him.”
Pietersen’s numbers still bite. Only Root and Alastair Cook have scored more than his 13,779 international runs for England. For a decade he was the lightning rod of English batting, his switch-hits, slog-sweeps and audacious drives looking like they belonged to a future era. That future is now the norm in white-ball cricket, which makes his presence in the current set-up feel oddly logical.
Root was clear on what England are getting.
“With his experience and knowledge about the game, and all that he can offer, I think he’s going to be great,” he said. Pietersen, he added, “is not afraid to speak his mind. That’s him as a person. When you get someone involved you want them to be themselves and you want them to come into an environment for a reason.”
The divisive label will follow Pietersen for as long as people remember 2012 and the texts about Andrew Strauss, the 5-0 Ashes hammering under Cook, and Strauss later ruling out a recall because of a “trust issue”. Root’s message, though, was pointed: stop obsessing over what might go wrong.
“You’re looking at so many hypothetical things that could go wrong, when there are so many amazing things he will bring to that environment,” he said.
A mentor who once mentored Root
Before Pietersen becomes mentor to a new generation, it is worth remembering he already played that role for Root himself.
“He was always someone who gave me a huge amount, to be honest,” Root said, reflecting on his early days after debuting for England as a 21-year-old in 2012.
“He didn’t need to offer as much as he did to me, but he would sit there and work tirelessly, making sure I felt comfortable with my own game. He listened to all my questions and helped as much as he could. As a senior player, he was outstanding.”
Those sessions came long before McCullum’s Bazball revolution, before the split between red-ball and white-ball priorities truly hardened. Now, Pietersen steps into a white-ball environment that has been shaped by the sort of fearless batting he once embodied almost alone.
Root’s England chase clean sweep
While Pietersen prepares to slip into a coaching role, Root has more immediate business. He will lead England in the third and final Test against Pakistan at Edgbaston on Wednesday, with the hosts chasing a 3-0 clean sweep in his first series back as captain.
As at Lord’s and The Oval, Root kept his XI under wraps, but all signs point to an unchanged side. Why tinker when the formula has delivered back-to-back wins?
Off the field, though, the talk has not just been about selection. Ticket prices for next summer’s home Ashes have triggered a fierce debate. At Edgbaston, seats in the raucous Hollies Stand are £165, up from £125 for the 2023 Ashes against Australia.
Root did not wade into the economics.
“I don’t know what it takes to run a county or run a venue, I don’t know what goes into that,” he admitted. His concern lies elsewhere. “From a playing point of view and as a captain, you want the grounds to be full, and you want them to be full of every demographic of person.
“You want the game to feel like it is for everyone, that they can come to support you and enjoy that. It would be great to see this place full and thriving, and for everyone to have the opportunity to come to watch Test cricket.”
The message was simple: let the sport remain accessible, let the stands stay packed.
No appetite for a Stokes-McCullum comparison
Root’s return to the captaincy has inevitably sparked comparisons with the Ben Stokes–McCullum era. Under Stokes, England developed a curious habit: flying out of the blocks in a series, then stumbling at the end. They have lost the final Test in each of their past six multi-match series.
Only a win in Birmingham breaks that pattern, and Root knows it. But he shut down any attempt to turn this into a referendum on his predecessor or the previous coach.
“We wouldn’t have been able to play these last two games without all of the work those two did,” he said. “I think it’s undervalued the impact what those two guys had on English cricket.
“You look at where we were and how we played our cricket, you look at how we’ve been able to perform in the last two games, a lot of that is down to the hard work and the way they changed the mentality within English cricket and this team.
“I’m not going to sit here and have comparisons thrown against those two, I don’t think that’s fair whatsoever. They deserve a lot of credit for the last two performances.”
So England move into Edgbaston with an old star returning in a new role, a captain determined to protect the legacy of the regime before him, and a team trying to prove it can finish a series as strongly as it starts.
Pietersen once dominated this stage with a bat. Now we find out what kind of mark he can leave with a clipboard and a voice in the dressing room.
