KP and the green-eyed monster

So KPgate twitters on, fuelled by the bonfire of the inanities we really ought to call antisocial media. I keep thinking about the late Gore Vidal, the American writer who fully lived up to his forename when playing the bull to the intellectual matadors who dared contradict or outsell him. Here, as with all human squabbles, is a saga grounded in jealousy, and nobody peered into the jaws of the green-eyed monster more intently than good ol' Gorey.

To classify envy as jealousy's milder, politer brother is to split hairs. That is why the closest Vidal ever came to an incontrovertible statement was when he cited envy as "the central fact of American life". The "American" was superfluous. Few understood, or practised, schadenfreude as well as Vidal. Whenever a friend succeeded, he confessed, "I die a little". "It is not enough to succeed," he declared on another occasion, "others must fail." Even, seemingly, if they are supposed to be on your side.

Call it the e-word or the j-word, this is what lies at the heart of KPgate. Just as it has done in every rivalry since Cain realised he was related to that goody two-shoes Abel. "Human race", after all, has two meanings.

Name a team - or band, orchestra, repertory company or circus troupe - that hasn't been riven and driven by jealousy. Call it the competitive fuel. Ajmal Shahzad characterised the England dressing room as "dog eat dog". Not quite as bad as Hollywood - where, as Woody Allen put it, "dog doesn't return other dog's calls" - but that is scant consolation.

More than any other single factor, jealousy can make or break a team. It can be productive or destructive. Will it compel a batsman to demand a non-existent run, a fielder to slow down in pursuit of a catch? Or will it stir the competitive juices, and hence make the whole greater than the totality of its constituents?

That is why team sports are so much more fascinating than their mano a mano variations. Physics and biology are intrinsic to both, but chemistry only enters the equation when we are talking about a multiplicity of egos. Can we be surprised that even Mr and Mrs Coca-Cola have yet to bottle that magical, mystical, mythical potion "team spirit" and flog it in supermarkets? Can we wonder at the Americans' continued bemusement over Europe's Ryder Cup dominance?

The most honest statement amid the hailstorm of soundbites culled gleefully from KP: The Autobiography? That would be the subject's confession that he was jealous of Andrew Strauss' success as England captain - success he believed should have been his. Shades of Mike Denness and Sir Geoffrey.

I once asked Tom Moody, the first man to play and coach in a World Cup final, what kept him going, besides the pay cheque. "Being involved in team success," came the vigorous reply. "Nothing's better than that. Individual success is short-lived. I remember more team than personal achievements. That's what makes me tick, makes me turn up. Kids that play team sports learn so many good values. If you're selfish, go play golf." Sadly, as KPgate has reminded us, adult success is rarely the product of so utopian an ideal.

"People may think that [team dressing rooms] are places of milk and honey and soothing music but they are not. I had a dinner in India one night not long ago with some great players from a few different countries… the stories that were swapped around would make your hair stand on end. I have rugby friends and football friends and the stories are all the same." These are the most incontestable words in KP: The Autobiography.

Among international teams, ironically, the lone exceptions that spring to mind are those to whom national identity took a back seat: the West Indies XIs led by Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards, a regional side bonded by a common enemy - racial discrimination. They also pulled together in defiance of administrators and selectors they regarded as unappreciative at best, at worst contemptuous, curmudgeonly, and yes, jealous.

Doubtless there were occasions when Viv's majesty and Macca's completeness and Mikey's coolness sharpened envy's daggers. Sure, they were playing for something bigger than themselves, but to ignore human nature would be hopelessly romantic. Unity of purpose spiced by rivalry can be an intoxicating recipe.

Is the j-word the secret ingredient that makes team spirit at once so elusive and so potent? Some say it cannot be brewed without mutual respect, but respect does not preclude jealousy. The greater the sum of individual talents, the fiercer the internal competition, the more successful the whole? Malcolm Marshall, lest we forget, was alone among those great Windies quicks in nabbing 300-plus Test scalps.

Witness the planet's finest sporting team right now, the Bryan twins, Bob and Mike, the first duo to complete a clean sweep of the season's nine ATP doubles titles. "I still think I'm better," Mike, three minutes older, told the Independent in 2009. "I still kick his ass every day in practice." Bob was not impressed. As boys, their father refused to let them compete against each other. "It was a smart play," reckoned Mike. "We both grew up dreaming of being No. 1 in the world, but how are you going to do that if you're not even No.1 in your bedroom? It helped us to grow up motivated, because we both thought we were better, but nobody had the proof."

Witness, too, the enmity between that big-hitting party animal Babe Ruth and his fellow New York Yankee, the upright, uptight Lou Gehrig. Lou envied the Babe's popularity and salary; Ruth longed for his rival's youth, demeaning him as Lou tore up the record books. Yet in 1927, they were the most dazzling of the diamond's "Invincibles", the core of the team still hailed as baseball's greatest.

During the domineering decades of Bradmania, Australia's dressing room was turbulence personified. To Jack Fingleton and Bill O'Reilly, Bradman was the enemy within: here, to Fingleton, was "a little, churlish man"; to O'Reilly, "a far-distant relative [who] did a tremendous amount of damage to Australian cricket". Were they angered by what they saw as Bradman's aversion to Irish Catholics or merely dissenters from his worldview? Or were they jealous - of his genius and status, his wealth and his power? We will never know, of course, but, being endlessly susceptible to such feelings ourselves, the j-word presumably had something more than a walk-on role.

On the face of it, the most depressing aspect of KPgate is how ruthlessly it shattered illusions. The only England team ever to attain the top slot in the Test rankings, apparently, was a hissing snakepit of bullies and egomaniacs. But why should we expect anything milder or more benign? Even wimps lose their bearings in that testosterone-powered enclave we call a dressing room. Especially one ruled by the tyrannical precision of the scoreboard, and by a game that requires archly competitive, not-quite adults to spend unhealthy stretches of time together.

Witness the mostly mild-mannered Mike Atherton, by his own admission "not a fighter… probably a bit yellow": not only was he once separated from a fellow England player when poised to throw the first punch of his life; he also grabbed an England bowler "by the scruff of his neck, and let rip". Even though the bowler was twice his size, "and, by rights, should have floored me". Even Mike Brearley, that most philosophical of cricketers, once had to be prised apart from Phil Edmonds just as he was about to trade blows with his fellow Cambridge graduate. The biggest surprise about KPgate is that fists haven't flown (so far as we know).

How apt, moreover, that Pietersen and Roy Keane should hit the back pages on the same day, and for essentially the same reasons: settling scores in print. As Matthew Syed noted in the Times, these arch-achievers found fame, ostensibly, as team players while being devout "ego fundamentalists". But whereas Keane was admired but rarely drew sympathy or even compassion, there are still many of us, even now, whose objections to KP the Commodity are mollified by memories of KP the Batsman, still helplessly in thrall to that extraordinary, thrilling, life-affirming audacity: a nerveless, heedless, sometimes headless bravado that can simultaneously hoist a team to the heights and plunge it into a prolonged pout.

Nothing proclaimed that louder than the childish fake Twitter account that so tickled Messrs Anderson, Broad and Swann. Three of their country's finest-ever bowlers they may be, but fancy being trumped time and again, in the middle, in the bank and in the public eye by a mere batsman, let alone a South African batsman, much less a South African batsman flaunting a huge IPL contract.

But what happens when the object of jealousy starts losing his mojo? As that fragile knee declined, did Pietersen himself, sensitivity seldom directed outwards, grow more jealous - not merely of Strauss but of younger thrusters and fitter colleagues; of how another ardent self-promoter, Swann, supped from the messy soup of antisocial media no less voraciously yet was never taken to task; of how Anderson and Broad offended so many with their petulance yet retained the loyalty and affection of captain and coach; of how Matt Prior out-Big Cheesed him?

Still, can we blame KP for concluding, publicly, that the cause of his downfall was his South African-ness, his outsiderhood, his otherness? After all, even on the treacherous pitches of antisocial media, blaming the green-eyed monster would have been a tweet too far.