England needs Sherlock more than Watson

SURE, Kevin Pietersen is difficult, but he can still solve problems.

England needs Sherlock more than Watson

IT'S a shame that Sherlock, the television show, changed from a brilliant and thrilling adventure based on the utterly exceptional qualities of its main character into a self-indulgent and self-referential soap-opera-cum-comedy based on one rather crude characterisation.

It is an equal shame that precisely the same thing has happened with the England cricket team. The Kevin Pietersen story once again dominates the plotlines of English cricket. Like Sherlock, it is a drama centred around a uniquely talented individual with questionable social skills.

In the first half of the most recent episode, someone describes Sherlock to his face as a psychopath. He contradicts, not without smugness: "No. High-functioning sociopath."

Well, let's not stick labels on people. Leave that to those qualified. An "anti-social personality disorder" often includes such traits as small regard for the feelings and welfare of others, inability to learn from experience, no sense of responsibility, lack of moral sense, no change after punishment, lack of guilt, pathological egocentricity and inability to love.

Pietersen's perpetually sticky relationships with his cricketing colleagues unquestionably go personality-deep. With my level of expertise I think we can confidently describe him as a high-functioning awkward bugger. And it has been widely reported that his relationship with Andy Flower, the England team director, has broken down disastrously.

It has even been suggested that Flower will not carry on if Pietersen remains on board. Another version states that Pietersen can stay on board so long as he devotes himself to scoring runs in county cricket at the beginning of the new season, instead of playing in the IPL. Kev can stay, but it'll cost him getting on for a million quid.

Flower was a great coach for England until this trip to Australia spoilt his record. His greatest achievements? Defeat of Australia in Australia in 2010-11 and defeat of India in India from one-down in 2012. How did these things come about?

In Adelaide in 2010, Pietersen changed the series in an innings of murderous certainty in which he scored 227. In Mumbai two years later, England was batting on a turning pitch tailored for India's needs; Pietersen scored 186, another classic momentum-shifter.

Flower, like all coaches, is essentially Watson. Coaches, even if they preen like Jose Mourinho, are at base facilitators, enablers and sounding boards. They don't solve the case: they are just helping out as best they can.

Cases are actually solved by the Sherlocks: the high-functioning ones. It was Pietersen, not Flower, who solved The Case of the Prematurely Celebrating Australians and The Case of the Indians Hoist With Their Own Petard.

We would all sooner deal with Watson, we'd sooner have a drink or a cup of tea with Watson and we save most of our sympathies for Watson, who is always in a perfectly intolerable situation. But if we want to solve the case, we need Sherlock.

Pietersen is now 33, and Flower must work out how many more cases he has left in him; Pietersen wants to bat on until the Ashes series of 2015. Preferably on his own terms.

Pietersen is often described as "a disruptive influence". Other cricketers who acquired the same tag include Ian Botham and Brian Lara. Yes, let's strengthen the West Indies team by dropping Lara: smart thinking, eh? And was England stronger without a man who regularly took five wickets in an innings and hit centuries for fun? Mediocrity is much more comfortable, but you don't win quite so many Test matches.

This is the eternal problem of the coach in a team sport. To what extent do you indulge the Sherlocks, the high-functioning awkward buggers? Pietersen was England's top scorer in Australia, even though he had as unhappy a tour as anyone.

Sport is full of Sherlocks. Every successful athlete has something of the sociopath, for winning can only be done at the expense of other people. Away from sport, we might interpret "killer instinct" as grotesque selfishness and "choking" as generosity of spirit.

But even in sport, there are athletes who clearly have more difficulty than others when it comes to Other People - those beings who, for some unfathomable reason, don't have You at the centre of their hearts and minds.

In such people you sometimes find a weird innocence. When Anthony Clare, in his program In the Psychiatrist's Chair, asked Geoffrey Boycott if he regretted missing out on such things as family life, Boycott responded with incomprehension. He wanted to be the best batsman in the world, he became the best batsman in the world, so how could anyone possibly think he had ever missed out on anything?

Ayrton Senna was also, in some respects, an innocent. In the famous story, he was taken to task for some failure of procedure or protocol and responded in four baffled words: "But I am Senna!" Eric Cantona said: "I have a lot of good moments, but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan."

People who do extraordinary things tend to be extraordinary people. This occasionally comes as a surprise to their biographers, who can make the error of discounting the achievements of great people after uncovering their moral failings. Is A la Recherche du Temps Perdu less of a book because Marcel Proust had shares in a male brothel and got sexually excited by the torture of rats? Are England's victories in Australia in 2010-11 or in India in 2012 tarnished by Pietersen being a difficult human being?

People who do unusual things tend to be unusual people and to live unusual lives. The belief that genius forgives all is not helpful, certainly not when it is held by a genius and even less when it is held by a person of minor talent. But great ability can be accompanied by difficult and sometimes undesirable traits.

Flower's job as England coach is the same as all coaches everywhere, to make the best team he has from the resources at his disposal. A previous England coach, Duncan Fletcher, took the view that Graeme Swann wasn't worth the trouble; under Flower, Swann turned into one of the greatest spin bowlers England has had.

The coaching ideal states that all people of great talent have a place in the team, and if it doesn't work out, you've failed, and so has everybody else. The awkward bugger tends to have problems with authority and therefore always has vexed relationships with coaches and captains.

People who do not conform to basic notions of civilised behaviour are a pain in the arse. But in sport it comes down to one simple question: do you want the runs? If you want to solve the case, you need Sherlock more than all the Watsons in the world.