It Had To Be KP
Pietersen - only real candidate.
With so few candidates for the England captaincy, Bob Willis says Kevin Pietersen was the only choice.
I think once the selectors decided they wanted the same man for one-day and five-day cricket, there was really only one candidate for the England captaincy.
They weren't going to go near Andrew Flintoff, Paul Collingwood didn't want it, so Kevin Pietersen was the only option. Those are the only three certain to play in one-day cricket, so the choice wasn't really a great one and it wasn't really a tough decision.
Pietersen is the best player as Brian Lara was for his team, as Viv Richards was for his team and you desperately hope the captaincy won't affect his batting skills - and I think it probably won't.
He's not the intellectual that Michael Vaughan is so I think he will be very much a man of the moment as captain, working on instinct rather than experience.
Initially I think he will have a very positive affect on the England side. Longer term though, I'm not quite so sure.
The one huge positive Pietersen has is there is no pressure on his shoulders to score runs. Everybody else in that line-up has been on the plank waiting to fall off the edge. Vaughan reprieved himself; Andrew Strauss reprieved himself, Ian Bell reprieved himself and now Paul Collingwood's reprieved himself and the only two batsmen who have not been under scrutiny are Alistair Cook and Pietersen.
Clearly they are not looking at Cook as captain yet - although it would have been for me, a more exciting choice - so if you want someone to take the job without any other pressures, Pietersen was the only option.
All things being equal I think Robert Key would have been quite an inspired appointment, although I don't think his face fits with the England selectors. Key has done it at Test level and particularly at Twenty20 level and one-day level and has a formula that seems to work.
A major issue is the schism between England's five day and one-day form. The one-day form is disparate and has been since 1992 when they reached the World Cup final in Australia and that's really been the problem. Once you decide you want different players to play one-day cricket and Test cricket, it's very difficult to have the same captain.
I think since the advent of central contracts they want to keep this unit as tight as possible and Peter Moores clearly believes it's easier to bond these players together if you have the same bloke in charge all the time. As Michael Vaughan said, when you're captain of both forms of the game, you're with these guys 10 months of the year and that's the position they want to get to.
Hopefully though, we can groom a successor to Pietersen. Without wishing to jump the gun, if Cook can hang on to his place in the one-day side, then he's the obvious candidate.
My biggest concern for Pietersen is his lack of his experience. Nasser Hussain, Michael Atherton and Vaughan were much more experienced individuals when they took the job. He has been around the England set-up now for about four years, so he should have picked up a lot of what Vaughan and Collingwood have to offer the team - but it is a lonely job when you're out there on your own in the field.
Pietersen's smiling face at 1pm on Monday and Vaughan's miserable face 24 hours earlier, shows you the pressures of the job. It all starts with pleasantness and light and full of great hope but through the fullness of time, because of the constrictions of the England and Wales Cricket Board, the guy gets worn down.
It makes perfectly good commonsense to keep the pressure off the Test captain by letting him just captain the Test side, but that's clearly not the way the England management see it.
They've had a spell of that and now want one in charge for both but if you ask the last three captains, they will tell you the England captain has a shelf-life of four or five years - if you're lucky.
A change of personnel at the top can have an uplifting affect on a side, but looking at the bigger picture, the selectors just don't get that many players to pick from because the selfishness of the 18 counties means there aren't many players qualified for England who are playing regularly. That is the bottom line, the ground floor problem, if you like.
Until the counties see their ridiculous selfishness about having old England players and overseas players who don't qualify, then England's chances in the Test arena and their subsequent choices for captain, aren't going to improve.
The fact of the matter remains, this England side has been playing on some very flat batting pitches. The bowling attack has under-performed because it couldn't bowl sides out on flat pitches and the batsmen have hopelessly under-performed because it has been their low scores in the first innings that have lost England the game.
However, there were only really three players in contention: Ravi Bopara, Owais Shah and Robert Key for these batting places. If you think that we have got 440 professional cricketers in this country and only three of them are in line to play for England, it is an absolute disgrace.
I do think England have got plenty to offer but they just don't have that extra in either skill to be number one in the world and never will have - no matter who's the captain.