Pietersen: down and out in Middlesex and Surrey

England’s best batsman is homeless. Not only is this hilarious, but the entire process is ludicrously managed.

The first role of handing in your notice is: (1) make sure you have another job to go to.

What does Pietersen do? Well. He suddenly downs tools in Hampshire, mid-season and without warning, and declares his intention to play for a London side.

The reason for this is that he lives in Chelsea – a fashionable barrio of London’s oligarch belt – and can’t be bothered to commute to Southampton. Which is a hole.

Perfectly understandable, of course, but, what we management gurus know, it’s all about the process. More or less every process KP has in life tends to cock up. Except batting of course, but even that is subject to some dubious decision-making. Yet, his genius is only qualified by his raging stupidity in other areas in life. And KP’s range of savant idiocy appears wider than most.

Now, the London clubs are fighting feverously to avoid picking him. Undoubtedly, the ECB is leaning heavily on both teams behind the scenes to pick up their wonder-moron. Pity the county that is left with the short straw.

Pietersen’s gift to the cricket community is not his excellent batting, but his celebrity gossip potential. Much like pre-pubescent girls, cricket fans paw over the former England captain’s failings in microscopic detail. Each hairy shot is magnified, dissected and derided.

That our own figures are woefully inadequate is irrelevant. KP’s gifts the world with repeated blunders. Under the cutting scrutiny of an unloving audience, nearly every non-covering driving activity is a slip-up.

And we wouldn’t have him any other way.