Now before I start, I’d like to point out that I am NOT anti-Kevin Pietersen. Not at all.

I recognise him as one of the best batsmen in the world and he is certainly one of England’s key men as well. But…

"Swashbuckling". And a bloody big gob.

Do you not think he fails more than he succeeds when he’s out on the pitch playing for ‘his’ country? Be it Test, one day or Twenty20, Pietersen consistently fails to live up to the talent we all know he has.

Sure, there are a few innings of utter style and, more importantly, big scores, but more often than not he gets out doing something stupid when it would have been more beneficial to the team to simply block.

“It’s his way,” you often hear. Well, I’m sick of hearing it. Tendulkar, while less swashbuckling, is a far higher run scorer and far better team player than Pietersen will ever be.

So it bugs me somewhat to read his comments regarding England bowlers and the Indian Premier League (IPL). Here’s a snippet of what he said:

“I was speaking to Paul Collingwood and we’d have liked to have had our bowlers here learning. A lot of our players should definitely have put their names in the hat.”

Aye, Kevin, and we’d like you to learn how to stay at the crease against some of the world’s better bowlers rather than trudging back to the pavilion with a 20 or 30 on the board.

Ok, I’m being a bit harsh. What he said wasn’t THAT bad. It would be beneficial for the likes of James Anderson and Stuart Broad to play in the IPL in a bid to learn to bowl better in the Twenty20 version of the game before the World Cup. Of course it would, there’s no substitute for matchplay.

Instead Broad and Anderson opted for rest after the winter tour of Bangladesh (not the greatest of challenges in itself, admittedly, though England still managed to make a struggle of it!) and will be fresh, if not practised, for the Twenty20 World Cup.

And why shouldn’t they? International cricketers play a lot of cricket so not playing in the Mickey Mouse version of the game at all in the lucrative but Mickey Mouse IPL is hardly something for the likes of Pietersen to be moaning about. Or Collingwood.

Test cricket remains, rightly so, the pinnacle of the game so until Pietersen can perform consistently to his high standards on that stage, I think he should shut the f*** up about other players and Twenty20.

Or am I just a purist with a gripe?