The day England were knocked out of cricket's World Cup I issued a tweet which read simply: "We need to talk about Kevin."

It would seem that if the England management that was in place then, or the new one, has done so they have had the wrong conversations.

Kevin Pietersen is a bloke whose style, ever since he first blasted his way into the public consciousness with his contribution to that long-awaited Ashes series win sporting that skunk 'do, I was never that keen on.

Full of himself, or at least eager to appear so, he was extremely hard to like but at a time when Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath were still competing, he most assuredly walked the walk and while, like every batsman since Bradman, he has endured lean periods, he has continued to do so ever since.

Likeability has never been a vital component in a top sportsman whereas it is a simple statement of fact that no England batsman in my now considerable lifetime, has had the capacity to transform matches as Pietersen can.

His is a maverick talent of a sort that has often been accommodated in Australia, South Africa, the West Indies and across the sub-continent down the years, but which English sport in general and cricket in particular, seems always to have struggled with.

Think back to how the career of David Gower, the finest England batsman before Pietersen, petered out following the Tiger Moth incident, but more particularly to the career path of their greatest ever player Ian Botham.

His behaviour was often outrageous and he could not have been more opposed to the drudgery of fitness training that was necessary to get the most out of lesser players, but when accommodated - most famously but by no means only, by Mike Brearley in 1981 - he was a phenomenal winner, using all sorts of unorthodox methods to find ways of turning things round that more rigidly disciplined individuals would not even have imagined trying, let alone have the capacity to carry out.

Within the camp his most famous fall-out was with Graham Gooch, a player remembered for methodically compiling thousands of runs with a very limited range of shots, but rather less so for match-winning performances in a Test career which began before and ended after Botham's.

When issues arose once Gooch ascended to the captaincy, I remember feeling, perhaps unfairly, that there was almost an element of vindictiveness at play as a less gifted man who had, for years, seen adulation heaped upon a team-mate with a different outlook, seized clumsily upon the opportunity to impose his authority and haul that individual into line.

England dominated Australia in the years before Gooch took over the captaincy in 1989. They did not win the Ashes again until Pietersen was in the team in 2005, alongside another rather wayward talent in the shape of Andrew Flintoff.

Andrew Strauss, newly appointed as England's new director of cricket this week as what officialdom will consider a safe pair of hands, was among those whose contributions to that 2005 Ashes victory were rather less celebrated than those of Pietersen, Flintoff and Michael Vaughan, the team captain.

Residual resentment was doubtless exacerbated as a personal edge was subsequently added to the relationship between Strauss and Pietersen due to the texts the latter exchanged with friends representing their native South Africa during Strauss's time as captain, but the rights and wrongs are disputed and, in any event, it was not Pietersen who was subsequently caught by a TV microphone using the least acceptable expletive of all to describe the other.

As to Strauss's reference yesterday to "a massive trust issue", he would seem to be on pretty shaky ground given that the first major decision in which he was involved, to sack Peter Moores, appears to have been well known among the press by some means or another before the out-going head coach had been informed.

There are always shades of grey in such matters, but there has been a shameful lack of integrity in how the England and Wales Cricket Board has behaved towards Pietersen, persuading him to turn down a lucrative Indian Premier League contract on what was a false pretext that he might revive his international career by playing meaningless matches in second tier English county cricket.

There was a hollow ring to Strauss's claims that Pietersen is "not banned from the side" given that he is so obviously the best available batsman, as he demonstrated on the very day they met this week with an innings that must be considered brilliant in its timing and execution, regardless of the standard of opposition.

The real difficulty here is the performance of the ECB, however, in apparently failing to do their homework before appointing Strauss as opposed to others with less of a personal axe to grind, such as Alec Stewart, who as Surrey's director of cricket said of Pietersen before this season began: "If he was a bad character we wouldn't have had him."

It looked as if the governing body had realised the error of its ways in failing to maximise its very limited playing resources when, last month, they sacked Paul Downton, the managing director who decided to tell Pietersen his services were surplus to requirements, after he had been in post for little more than a year.

Instead English cricket is now a laughing stock once more and while the end may yet justify the means with staid wee Straussy vindicated if an unexpected Ashes series win is claimed this summer, right now his behaviour looks like the latest example of an insecure, unimaginative, inflexible individual allowing a grudge borne of an inferiority complex to cloud better judgement.