Strauss takes on the KP 'ishoo'

"Ishoos".

It was always going to come down to them. Because England cricket has become a subplot in the Kevin Pietersen Story and with Pietersen, there are always "ishoos". He has "ishoos", and as a result, everybody he touches has "ishoos" with him.

Andrew Strauss gave his first public performance as England's new director of cricket on Tuesday and revealed that Pietersen was not coming back to play for the England "in the short-term". Meaning not this summer. That's just to make it sound a bit less apocalyptic than his sacking last year.

So to clarify: Pietersen has been sacked as an England cricket player, and now he has been unsacked. "He's not barred from the side," Strauss said on Tuesday. It's just that he's not been selected. Which is quite a different matter. He could be reselected again at any time. That's disregarding the small point that he's not going to be.

And the reason for this? "Massive trust ishoos." Which is interesting enough. Though one point that Strauss didn't make was that he was not crazy enough to commence his stint in charge of England cricket by building his team round a 34-year-old. That would be a barmy notion even in an "ishoo"-free scenario.

We've all admired Pietersen's timing over the years. It's one of those natural instincts. If there is the remotest possibility of making trouble, or of finding trouble and making it worse, or of taking on a kerfuffle and turning it into a first-class row, then KP's yer man.

So while all this was going on at Lord's, Pietersen was scoring loony amounts of runs for Surrey. He had been told to find a county and score runs if he wanted to return to the England team: you can't say that a triple-century, to which he was adding while Strauss's problem with trust issues was being coyly half-revealed to the public, doesn't add another pint of bat's blood to the witch's cauldron.

I suppose England did. After all, they picked him. Back then he was a South African cricketer with a reputation for mixing trouble and talent in more or less equal quantities. These days he's an ex-England player whose talent for trouble has outstripped his talent for talent.

It is a basic given of team management that any player, if sufficiently talented, can be accommodated in any team. If he makes the team better, it is the team's job to make it work. It's also the individual's job to fit in. So the point is that everybody has failed here. And now it seems that everybody has issues with that failure.

Poor Kevin. It's hard not to feel sorry for an egomaniac when people stop humouring him. Pietersen always wanted to be treated differently to everyone else: now he has been. First he was the only player in the history of England cricket ever to be sacked, and now he's the only England player ever to be unsacked and simultaneously unselected.

Perhaps Strauss's predecessor, Paul Downton - though the titles and the roles are subtly different - was wrong to make an issue of sacking Pietersen. Certainly it was a decision that made a sporting problem into a moral issue. And that put intolerable pressure on the captain, Alastair Cook.

Cook was forced to play the good boy, like Ralph in Lord of the Flies, while Pietersen revelled in his role as bad Jack. And while that makes a fine morality tale worthy of being studied by A level students across the cricketing world, it didn't help England win cricket matches. In fact, it's created a sorry mess.

It's not in Strauss's power to undo that. He can't wind back the clock to the point when England fell apart in Australia, or to when the England players started giggling disloyally over the wounding fake-Twitter account that lampooned Pietersen, or to when Pietersen started sending derogatory texts about his own team to the South African cricketers.

No. By accepting the job Strauss has accepted that he has to deal with a few "ishoos". And though he dealt strongly and confidently with the England Test captaincy - Cook uber alles - and with the one-day captaincy - Eoin Morgan's your man - and with the question of the coach - Jason Gillespie is "one of the candidates ... I want to listen to their philosophy of cricket" - this was a day when the old scene-stealer stole the scene once again.

Pietersen finished with 355 not out for Surrey on Tuesday: a mischief-maker's delight. That stupendous score opens a whole new can of issues. Sometimes it seems that the whole world is united in trying to service Pietersen's personal myth: he was dropped half-a-dozen times on the way to that impressive total.

But Strauss's job is England v New Zealand and then England v Australia this summer, and he has made his decision about that. It's neither the right decision nor the wrong decision. It will be the right decision if England score lots of runs, especially Cook, and it will be wrong if they don't. It really is as simple - and as illogical - as that.

So there is Pietersen, playing the misunderstood innocent after producing what is possibly the nastiest and certainly the ghastliest book in the woeful history of ghosted sporting autobiographies, one in which score-settling was top of the agenda and love of cricket nowhere. If you choose to write a book like that you can expect people to have issues with it.

The real KP story is an enthralling tale about the nature of teams, the chemistry within them, when is a team not a team and at what point a nonpareil becomes an intolerable burden on resources. And that's all very well for us, but for Strauss, it's not about the moral agenda or the philosophy of sport.

For Strauss, it's a sporting "ishoo". He's made his decision: now he must pray that England have a decent summer and that Pietersen eases up a little on the triple-centuries. If those two things don't happen, there'll be more "ishoos" for us all to face in the autumn.