Kevin Pietersen Returns to England: A New Era for the Test Side

Kevin Pietersen is back in England colours, and Joe Root is convinced this is a very different dressing room to the one that cast him out a decade ago.

Root, now back at the helm of the Test side, is the only current England red-ball player who shared an Ashes tour with Pietersen. He was there in 2013-14 when England were thrashed 5-0 in Australia and Pietersen’s international career ended in the wreckage. The scars from that winter ran deep. So did the politics that followed.

This week, the 46-year-old has been brought in from the cold, appointed as a mentor to England’s white-ball side in the build-up to the 2027 World Cup in South Africa, the country of his birth. It is a striking move, given how acrimoniously his England story seemed to close.

Root, though, sees opportunity, not ghosts.

“I’m fortunate enough to be in that position where I did play alongside him,” he told BBC Sport, pointing out that a large chunk of the current squad grew up watching Pietersen tear attacks apart. For them, this is not a rehabilitation project. It is a chance to learn from a player who changed what batting for England could look like.

And Pietersen did change it. Across a decade in international cricket he played with a modern white-ball mindset long before England fully embraced it. Reverse-sweeps, audacious charges, the sheer refusal to let bowlers dictate terms – his strokeplay felt like a preview of the era that would follow.

He was also, frequently, at the centre of a storm.

In 2012 he was dropped after sending derogatory text messages about then-captain Andrew Strauss to members of the South Africa side. He returned under Alastair Cook, only for Cook’s England to implode in that 2013-14 Ashes. Pietersen was discarded after the tour, with Strauss, later as director of cricket, publicly citing a “trust issue” in 2015 and closing the door on any recall.

Root knows all of that history. He lived part of it. Yet his focus now is on what Pietersen can bring, not what went before.

He describes a senior pro who, in his early days, went out of his way to help.

Root made his England debut as a 21-year-old in 2012. Pietersen, already a global star, could easily have kept his distance. Instead, Root remembers a senior player who sat with him, session after session, making sure the youngster felt at ease with his own game, answering every question, working “tirelessly” on the details. “As a senior player, he was outstanding,” Root said.

That willingness to speak his mind, to challenge, remains part of the package. Root does not want it diluted.

“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.”

Root is adamant the landscape has shifted since the bitter fall-out of 2014. “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,” he said, pushing back on the idea that old tensions should define the move. For him, the upside dwarfs the hypotheticals.

Only Root and Cook have scored more international runs for England than Pietersen’s 13,779. Those numbers alone command respect. Now he will join Brendon McCullum’s staff for the white-ball series against Sri Lanka next week, a link-up that brings together two of the game’s most attacking batting minds in a backroom designed to sharpen England’s limited-overs edge.

While Pietersen steps into a mentoring role, Root has more immediate business. He will lead England in the third and final Test against Pakistan at Edgbaston on Wednesday, with the hosts chasing a 3-0 sweep in his first series back as captain. As at Lord’s and in the opening Test, he refused to reveal his XI ahead of the toss, though England are expected to go unchanged.

Off the field, another debate has been simmering since that Lord’s win – ticket prices for next summer’s home Ashes. At Edgbaston, seats in the raucous Hollies Stand are £165, up from £125 for the 2023 Ashes. The jump has drawn criticism from supporters worried that the game is pricing out its core.

Root chose his words carefully. He admitted he does not know what it costs to run a county or a venue, but from a player’s perspective his priorities are simple: full grounds, diverse crowds, and a sense that Test cricket belongs to everyone. “You want the game to feel like it is for everyone, that they can come to support you and enjoy that,” he said. “It would be great to see this place full and thriving, and for everyone to have the opportunity to come to watch Test cricket.”

On the pitch, England face a different kind of scrutiny. Under Ben Stokes, they often burst out of the blocks in a series, only to fade at the finish. They have lost the final Test in each of their past six multi-match series. Root knows only a win in Birmingham breaks that habit.

He also bristled at any suggestion that early success under his restored captaincy diminishes what Stokes and McCullum achieved.

“We wouldn't have been able to play these last two games without all of the work those two did,” he said, arguing that their impact on mindset and style has been “undervalued”. England’s bold, front-foot cricket, he insisted, owes plenty to the foundations laid by his predecessor and the New Zealander. “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 England head into Edgbaston with a chance to complete a clean sweep, a returning captain determined to close out a series properly, and a former superstar stepping back into the fold in a new guise.

The old fractures are on the record. The runs are, too. Now comes the real test: can Pietersen’s fiercely individual cricket brain help shape England’s next white-ball era, just as Root tries to write a new chapter for the Test side?