Kevin Pietersen Returns to England as Mentor: A New Era
Kevin Pietersen is back in England colours. Not at the crease this time, but in the dressing room – and Joe Root insists this is a very different England to the one that cast him out a decade ago.
Root, now back in charge of the Test side, is the last remaining England red-ball player to have shared a changing room with Pietersen. He was on that bruising 2013-14 Ashes tour in Australia, the trip that ended Pietersen’s international career and detonated one of English cricket’s most bitter fallouts.
Ten years on, the once-exiled star has been brought in from the cold.
Pietersen returns – as mentor, not maverick
On Monday, the ECB confirmed that Pietersen will join Brendon McCullum’s white-ball coaching staff as a mentor, with an eye on the 2027 World Cup in South Africa, the country of his birth. For a generation of current England players, he is more legend than former team-mate.
“A lot of the guys will have watched him and got into the game because of him,” Root told BBC Sport. “It will be great for those guys to have the opportunity to work alongside him.”
Few would argue with Pietersen’s playing credentials. Across a decade of international cricket, he piled up 13,779 runs for England – a tally bettered only by Root and Alastair Cook – and did it with a swagger that belonged to a different era. Switch-hits, audacious drives, ruthless hitting through and over the infield: his method looks entirely at home in modern white-ball cricket, but it was ahead of its time when he first unleashed it.
The talent was never in doubt. The turbulence was.
Pietersen’s England career veered from brilliance to bust-up. In 2012 he was dropped amid allegations he had sent derogatory text messages about then captain Andrew Strauss to South Africa players. He returned under Cook’s leadership, but when England were thrashed 5-0 in the 2013-14 Ashes, the axe fell. In 2015, Strauss, by then director of cricket, closed the door with a blunt explanation: there was a “trust issue”.
Now, Root insists, the landscape has changed.
“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. “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’s debt to KP
Root knows Pietersen not as a myth, but as a senior pro who helped shape his early days in international cricket. Between 2012 and 2014, the pair played 12 Tests and nine ODIs together, with Pietersen then the established star and Root the 21-year-old newcomer from Yorkshire.
“He was always someone who gave me a huge amount, to be honest,” Root said. “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.”
That willingness to talk, to challenge, to say exactly what he thinks, remains a defining part of Pietersen’s character.
Root is under no illusions about that.
“That's him as a person,” he said. “When you get someone involved you want them to be themselves and you want them to come into an environment for a reason. With his experience and knowledge about the game, and all that he can offer, I think he's going to be great.”
Pietersen will link up with McCullum’s staff for the white-ball series against Sri Lanka next week, a neat symmetry given how both men helped redefine aggressive batting in their eras. Now they stand on the other side of the boundary rope, trying to shape England’s next wave.
Root’s England chase clean sweep – and full stands
While Pietersen steps into a new role, Root’s immediate focus lies at Edgbaston, where England face Pakistan in the third and final Test on Wednesday. Two games, two wins so far. A 3-0 clean sweep is in sight in Root’s first series since returning as captain.
As at Lord’s and the first Test, Root declined to reveal his XI ahead of the toss, and England are expected to remain unchanged. Continuity has brought control in this series. One more performance will bring a statement.
Off the field, though, a different debate has been simmering since that Lord’s win – ticket prices for next summer’s home Ashes.
At Edgbaston, seats in the famously raucous Hollies Stand for the Ashes are priced at £165, up from £125 for the 2023 series against Australia. For many supporters, that jump bites hard.
Root did not wade into the economics, but he did not hide what players want to see.
“I don't know what it takes to run a county or run a venue, I don't know what goes into that,” he said. “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 tension is clear: a premium product on the field, and a battle to keep it accessible off it.
No appetite for comparisons with Stokes and McCullum
Root’s return to the captaincy comes with its own narrative. Under Ben Stokes and McCullum, England ripped up convention, played a ferocious brand of attacking cricket and re-energised the Test side. Yet there was a nagging habit: England have lost the final Test in each of their last six multi-match series.
Only a win in Birmingham changes that line in the record books. Root knows it. He also knows where the foundations of this current form were laid.
“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 Root stands at an intriguing crossroads: defending the legacy of Stokes and McCullum while trying to build his own second act as captain, welcoming back one of English cricket’s most divisive greats as a mentor, and pushing for a clean sweep that would underline England’s renewed authority.
If Pietersen’s first England career ended amid acrimony and mistrust, his second chance arrives in a dressing room Root insists has grown up, moved on, and opened its doors to different voices.
What happens next – on the field and behind that dressing-room door – will say plenty about what this new England really stands for.
