Kevin Pietersen left out in the English cold despite fireworks

The timing was so exquisite it beggared belief even by the standards of the most showbizzy and controversial sportsman in Britain.

At The Oval, on one side of London, Kevin Pietersen was making 355 not out for Surrey against Leicestershire, the seventh-highest score among the half-million or so innings played in the entire history of English cricket.

On the other side, at Lord's, an official announcement was confirming what Pietersen had been told the night before: there will be no place for him in the England team to play Australia this summer.

The news was broken to Pietersen and the world by the former England captain Andrew Strauss, who was appointed team director last week. "He is not barred from the England team," said Strauss. "He is not part of our plans for the summer. Beyond that I can give no guarantees to him or any other player." This is cricket-board speak for "go to hell, Kev".

Strauss is a notably polite man and one of the captains who proved most adept at managing Pietersen's talent and massaging his ego - though even he was caught on air last year describing him with a very rude word indeed.

Reacting to the Monday meeting, Pietersen in a column for the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday night rejoindered: "I just find it incredibly deceitful what has happened to me and am frankly finding it difficult to understand right now. I have done everything I have been asked. I keep asking myself, what more could I do?"

Pietersen - KP throughout cricket - arrived in England from South Africa as a 20 year old in 2000 having fallen out with his provincial team there. From the start he had a reputation for outrageous talent and rampant egomania, and the spectacular batting was always interspersed with equally spectacular fallings-out. And eventually, as time (he is 35 next month) appeared to be taking the edge off his brilliance, those closest to the England team were starting to think enough was enough.

Last year he published an autobiography that rubbished just about everyone. Having done that, he set about trying to win his England place back as though nothing had happened. With some encouragement from Colin Graves, now chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and Strauss's boss, he gave up a lucrative contract to play in the Indian Premier League to make runs for Surrey as preparation for a possible return - in front of tiny crowds and for zero money, for in a characteristic gesture he is giving his smallish salary to charity.

He could hardly have fulfilled Graves' advice more dramatically. But it was a waste of time, as anyone might have guessed except Pietersen. Even so, the Twittersphere, which KP (2.56m followers) bestrides the way he can dominate a cricket field, was full of sympathy for him after this latest setback. "Team is not about mates, it's about winning," advised the former England rugby captain Will Carling. Non-English cricketers joined in. "What a joke!" said the retired Australian batsman Matthew Hayden.

KP himself, who the other week involved his Twitter followers in the great adventure of him going home by train to his pop star wife, was possibly still too knackered by his epic innings to say anything.

The ECB has a longstanding reputation for ineptitude, even by the standards of most sporting bodies. But it has excelled itself of late. The Graves regime has installed a new chief executive, Tom Harrison, who promptly removed both Strauss's predecessor, Paul Downton, and the coach, Peter Moores - both messily, both after only a year. And Strauss himself confused the issue by offering KP an advisory role in one-day cricket, which he understandably rejected. The new coach has yet to be named; it is unlikely to be someone opposed to the party line.

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