LONDON: The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) announced that, Kevin Pietersen, one of the greatest English players of all time, is not in its consideration for upcoming Caribbean tour and World Twenty20 scheduled in March, thus bringing to an end his 11-year long cricketing career, ARY News reported on Wednesday.
According to ECP, Pietersen will not be inducted into the team anymore. Pietersen said he will continue his cricketing career, despite his disconnection from the English team at the international arena.
The 5-0 whitewash in Australia seems to have reopened rifts in the England dressing room. Pietersen is thought to have regarded former coach Andy Flower's management as overly intense and serious and was thought to be hopeful that Giles, the limited-overs coach, would encourage a more relaxed environment. But Pietersen was rested from the limited-overs format of the Australia tour as England lost the ODIs 4-1 and went down 3-0 in the T20 series.
Friction between Pietersen and the ECB existed long before the Ashes series. At the start of 2009, he lost the captaincy after questioning the qualities of the coach, Peter Moores, who was also sacked; in 2012, he retired from ODI and T20 cricket and then was dropped after sending texts to members of the touring South Africa team.
Pietersen, England's record scorer across all formats, with a purely Test tally of 8,181 runs in 104 matches, including 23 hundreds, at an average of 47.28. Throughout his ODI career, he scored 4440 runs at an average of 40.73 runs in 136 matches. He also emerges as a fine player of T20 format in which he has 1176 runs to his credit in 37 matches at an average of 37.93.
