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At the end of his time as consultant to the England cricket setup Gilbert Enoka praised Brendon McCullum’s incredible work in healing the culture of his team. Enoka is best known as the architect of the no-dickheads policy in sport. This is basically Doctor Dickhead. Dickheads? He’s not having them.
“There wasn’t one dickhead in there,” Enoka announced, proudly. And history has shown this to be correct. All the evidence suggests the numerical value of dickheads in the England cricket team was something other than one. And yes, zero is not one. Fair point. But so are all the other numbers, the ones that go up the other way into plurals, multiples, an infinity of dickheads.
Enoka’s work with England ran to November 2025. Around that time Harry Brook had a fight with a bouncer, Jacob Bethell and Josh Tongue went boozing before a game, and Rob Key set his own fine example by deciding the best thing to do was keep it all under wraps.
A month later it was Noosa, more booze, Ben Duckett lost in space. Next up in the kingdom of not one dickhead we had the Lord’s curfew stuff, Ben Stokes having a hissy fit, then on to Derby and handcuffs. So yes. It’s pretty clear. There wasn’t one dickhead in that dressing room. Gilbert, you tried to warn us.
As of this week we have something else. Into this farrago of numerically uncertain dickhead magnitude comes the latest calming influence. Enter Kevin Pietersen, who is back as England’s white-ball mentor for the three-month rollercoaster ride that begins on Tuesday at the Utilita Bowl. Daddy’s home.
The no‑dickheads policy has never made total sense. Who gets to decide what a dickhead is? By everyday measures most elite sports people would probably qualify. Dickheads are good at stuff. There is no gentle, nice, rational way to become this good at doing essentially pointless things with a ball. Obsessive and hypercompetitive? Able to suppress or blindly unleash your deepest emotions? Liking it so far. Put your name down and we’ll have a look.
To be fair, Enoka’s definition involves basically not being a dickhead to your teammates. Toxic elements erode internal culture. But does this work in cricket, which has always been an individual pursuit masquerading as a team sport? You don’t have to like each other. Get the numbers. Team spirit is the gloss.
In many ways Pietersen is living proof of this. Here we have King Dickhead, the skunk-haired doofus, a man who brought down two regimes, including his own. And yet on runs, average, strike rate and impact Pietersen is also the best all-format batter England have had. Crucially he was also great for the team, a match-winner in Ashes series and the T20 World Cup, and one of the key driving elements in the best England era of the modern age. If this is dickhead-dom, juice it into our veins. All of which is a roundabout way of saying welcome back, Kev. Whatever the final outcome, this feels right. Sadly it probably won’t put a stop to the primary career of being a YouTuber. Here we have the most significant England player of his generation dancing with Indian children for likes. KP loves to be loved. He’s a performer. But somehow it’s hard to avoid the feeling this is all going to end up with him climbing Big Ben in a Spider-man suit.
There is a strong argument that all elite coaching appointments should be made on coaching merit alone. But let us make an exception in this case. Most obviously because it is just pure content, at a time when international cricket really does need it.
England will play six otherwise mundane white‑ball games in the next 14 days. But now that it’s KP’s England, we’re talking the Oval, Brett Lee and that wild, foundational 153; Leeds, where he windmilled off one of the great adrenaline-fuelled hate-hundreds against South Africa; Cardiff, where KP played the paddle sweep of doom in 2009, a sweep so provocative it dominated the back-page outrage for days.
This is not just theatre. KP makes sense as an England and Wales Cricket Board asset. The most influential cricketer of his era really shouldn’t be out there roaming the badlands. Pietersen was not a head prefect in the Strauss‑Cook mould, but these were really avatars of the past, whereas Pietersen was the only person who saw the future clearly, and was duly massacred for it.
KP was right about batting, right about franchise cricket. He was right about the entire direction of travel. When he packed him off into retirement Andrew Strauss gave a very preachy speech about a lack of trust. Whose version of the game are you going to trust now?
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More to the point, Pietersen was the original Bazball. And KP-ball did it properly, did it with results, did it when it was revolutionary. Nobody took risks like this, or modelled a vision of the Test game like this, one that England cricket really should have been selling ever since. The crowds in Trafalgar Square, the punkish superstar with the lightning hands, the reverse sweep for six off Muttiah Muralitharan that stopped the news cycle. That was the thing to sell, before all you had left to give was five-ball overs and the Super Fried Oval Wangdoodles.
If cricket had remained on free TV, Pietersen would have been our Beckham, our Botham, our Alison Hammond, not out there goofing on YouTube or creeping back in as Baz’s bagman.
How will this version play out? What is his remit? The original mentor, Mentor, was basically a childminder for the infant Telemachus in the Odyssey. And for all his star swagger KP has always seemed suited to elite‑development stuff. As a player he tended to buddy up with his younger teammates, if only because he didn’t get on with the older ones. But he gets talent, understands the idea of finding your own way. KP working with Aneurin Donald, for example, another late starter with a lightning blade, is a mouthwatering prospect.
Finally, Pietersen also has a very different energy from the man who appointed him. Baz is vibes, coolness and golf. KP is a batting badger. He loves practice. He relishes the angles, the grip stuff, the backswing chat. Watch the Sky Sports batting masterclasses recorded by these two and the contrast is very funny.
McCullum gets someone to throw tennis balls at him then just whacks them. “This is what I do. You chuck the tennis ball. I hit it there. Chuck another one, I hit it there.” Meanwhile KP is talking about feet v head position, about ripping up the MCC handbook, about rewiring himself with his personal coach. One of these is compelling, moreish and elite-feeling. The other one is a guy hitting some tennis balls. Who knows, this could be McCullum’s last great gift. It is still remarkable he’s in a job, not to mention one for which he hasn’t shown any great capacity. But the KP appointment is good. With a little luck it may even be another nudge that there are other methods, and a move towards McCullum flagging his own obsolescence.
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