The Sports Bookshelf

The latest episode in the cricket soap opera surrounding Kevin Pietersen looks unlikely to bring any insights into life behind the scenes in the England cricket dressing room, even though the most talented and controversial England batsman of recent years looks to have jettisoned for good, with a great many secrets to take with him. Andrew Strauss Perhaps what England skipper Alastair Cook and ex-head coach Andy Flower really think about Pietersen brilliant but destructive career will be revealed in a book one day, when what appears to be a mutually agreed omertà among the parties involved can be put to one side. In the meantime, here's some of what Cook's predecessor Andrew Strauss had to say about KP in his autobiography, Driving Ambition , published by Hodder and Stoughton in October last year, beginning with the call from Flower that marked the start of the 'textgate' saga that marred the last weeks of the former captain's career. Strauss recalled th

Steve James has won the 2012 Cricket Writers' Club award for Cricket Book of the Year for his excellent dissection of England's rise to number one cricket team in the world, The Plan. Subtitled How Fletcher and Flower Transformed English Cricket , the book essentially charts the journey the England team embarked upon when they were officially the worst team in world cricket in 1999 to their coronation as the best, holding the No 1 Test ranking, in 2011, analysing how they were guided there by the two Zimbabwean coaches, Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower. The Plan begins with the appointment of Fletcher as England's first overseas coach in 1999, alongside Nasser Hussain as captain, and takes the reader through the subsequent captaincies of Michael Vaughan, Andrew Flintoff and, briefly and turbulently, Kevin Pietersen, through Peter Moores's time as coach, and on to the era of Flower and Andrew Strauss.  James examines in depth how each event and decision along the

The latest episode in the Kevin Pietersen saga came too late for James Anderson to lay into his ostracised teammate in his new book. Not that he would have been wise to, anyway, given the furore that followed Graeme Swann's honest but entirely polite criticism of KP's leadership qualities. Jimmy: My Story made the transition from interviews to words on the page in the skilled hands of the same ghostwriter who worked with Swann on The Breaks Are Off, in which the England off-spinner suggested that Pietersen was 'not a natural leader'. The comment was one that Andy Flower, the England coach, felt Swann should have kept to himself while the two were sharing a dressing room, while Pietersen responded by saying that it was 'not a clever book (to write) in the middle of your career'. No surprise, then, that fast bowler Anderson confines his comments to former teammates such as his ex-captains, Michael Vaughan, whose leadership style he didn't care for,