Completing Pietersen
Pietersen - could flourish under the captaincy.
Nasser Hussain sees no reason why Kevin Pietersen can't make a success of the England captaincy.
You don't know how good a captain someone is going to be until you give them that chance, so why not Kevin Pietersen?
It is a little bit more of gamble than going for someone like Andrew Strauss, who's done it before and shown he has a good cricket brain, but Pietersen has shown throughout his cricket career that he will confront everything and give everything that has been put in front of him his best possible shot - and he will do that with the captaincy.
This is a lad who walked into my dressing room eight years ago as a Natal player when I was England captain and sat next to me and said 'I want to come and play in England, will you sort me out some club cricket?'
He has overcome every single obstacle that has been put in front of him to be where he is now, so history suggests he will give this his best shot and be a successful captain.
You just don't know until someone does it. We thought Michael Vaughan would make a good captain, little did we know he that was going to be one of the best captains of all-time - and a genius in the role.
With Pietersen it really is wait and see, but why not give him the job?
He's got the sort of attitude that if he can pass it on to his captaincy, he will be a success.
I don't think the inexperience matters either: Michael Vaughan was inexperienced as a leader, I was inexperienced as a leader, Michael Atherton was. You learn as you go as captain, you develop your own skills and even Michael Vaughan admitted on Sunday that for the first few games, he was guessing really and after that he worked out his own methods.
The biggest gamble is that England's best player has become their captain and history tells you that can have a negative effect.
But occasionally, it affects it the other way as well. Look at Graham Gooch - it made him an even better player.
Pietersen showed the other day when he got out for 94 that he was still batting as an indvidual and maybe giving him the captaincy will make him the complete player, like his opposite number this Thursday, Graeme Smith. He played the captain's innings at Edgbaston because he saw the bigger picture - and as captain, you have to play the situation.
The role can affect your batting in a negative way because you only have so much mental capacity in your head and generally when you're a player you can use 90 per cent of that on your batting.
How many times have you heard people say so much of professional sport is in in your head? Well, if you're not captain your brain's 90 per cent free to get yourself through an innings.
If you're worried about selection, how you've captained for the last few days, if you've just told your mate he is not playing in the next game, if you've not been pulling your weight as captain, if you've dropped a catch, or if you're losing the Test match, you've got a scrambled brain.
The positive effect was what we saw from Smith. He had been given the job of leading South Africa to victory for the first time in England since 1965 and had had to do it - he could not afford any rashness. Pietersen was still playing as an individual, he could afford some rashness, he could afford to be the million-dollar player.
But sometimes as a captain you have to rein yourself in and play the situation. Look at Atherton in Johannesburg in 1999; he was leading from the front and that is something Pietersen will have to learn.
One thing in his favour is, I don't think English cricket is in as bad a state as when I took over with Duncan Fletcher; it has a lot more going for it on the field and off the field.
What Pietersen has to do is transform players that we think have the potential to become great players and give them that single-minded, determination and selfishness with which he has transformed his game - but not to the detriment of the team.
From when he walked into our dressing room eight years ago that is how he has transformed his game. He has to transfer that to your Alistair Cook's, your Ian Bell's, your Stuart Broad's, your Monty Panesar's - all good players, but who don't click as a unit.
They're just doing enough to be around be good players; they're not pushing themselves to be the best possible players that they can and create a team that is the best it can be. Pietersen's done that with himself. His job is now to do that with the England team as a whole.