Pietersen Leads As Vaughan Leaves
Pietersen - Man Of The Moment.
A week, as you have no doubt heard, can be a long time in politics.
But ask Michael Vaughan or Kevin Pietersen and they might tell you it can be even longer in the world of international cricket.
This time last week Vaughan was looking for cracks in a South Africa team who had been largely outplayed by England in the first Test and dreaming of a triumphant 2-1 series win.
Pietersen, meanwhile, was most likely despatching a handful of unfortunate net bowlers with his much talked about switch hit and pondering how many zeros a quickfire century at Edgbaston might add on to any future Indian Premier League contract.
Fast forward seven days and one is contemplating the end of his captaincy - perhaps even his career - and the other is the newly-appointed king of English cricket.
Much has been said, rightly, in glowing testament to Vaughan's reign, while the usual procession of pundits and talking heads have had their say on the pros and cons of handing Pietersen the job.
As such, it would be treading some already well covered ground to discuss either matter here.
Instead, perhaps it is apt to question the import of the one thing both the Pietersen champions and the KP naysayers are broadly agreed on: the 28-year-old got the job through a lack of viable alternatives at least as much as any innate aptitude for the task.
National selector Geoff Miller admitted as much when he anointed Pietersen as the only man capable of unifying the captaincy of the Test, ODI and Twenty20 teams.
Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook have both spent more time out of the limited-overs set-up than in it in the last year, while the leftfield candidate, Kent's Robert Key, has not played for his country at any level since January 2005.
That the selection panel can muster only one name they would confidently choose on a regular basis in the long and short forms of the game is damning in the extreme and shows just how far the waters have been muddied in recent times.
Andrew Flintoff, of course, is guaranteed to play every England game he is able for but his latest comeback is in its infancy and he is, by his own estimation as well as the ECB's, no longer a captaincy prospect.
Other than that the England team is a mish-mash of players uncertain of their role in a pecking order whose flux it is increasingly hard to fathom.
Owais Shah remains by some stretch county cricket's most accomplished middle-order batsman across the formats yet finds himself inexplicably overlooked for Test duty time and again. Key is discussed as skipper material in one breath and consigned to Lions duty in the next, while Matt Prior, Phil Mustard, Tim Ambrose and potentially James Foster are engaged in an ongoing game of musical chairs for the keeper's gloves.
Typically, in the latest squad announcements Ambrose was reaffirmed as five-day gloveman while Prior, currently racking up enough droppings/recalls to make Graeme Hick's treatment in the 90s look even-handed, was appeased with a shot in the forthcoming one-day series. Talk about mixed messages.
Pithiest of all, though, came Miller's reaction to the by-now legendary Darren Pattinson cock-up.
Having called him up, saw him handed a debut, had the buck passed to him by a disgruntled Vaughan and then swiftly dropped him again, Miller reacted by insisting the Australian-raised former roofer was now "part and parcel of the squad". The Nottinghamshire squad, as it turned out.
Stuart Broad, meanwhile, was 'rested' last week to avoid burnout before being sent from Birmingham to Trent Bridge to take part in a top-of-the-table county clash.
Pietersen's most pressing task will be to sort out all of these baffling inconsistencies at the first opportunity and insist on a core of players capable of taking England forward in the Test and limited-overs game.
And given results of late that may mean a more drastic change of approach than the one - enforced - change made for this week's fourth Test.