Kevin Peter Pietersen was born on 27th June 1980 in South Africa thus continuing the tradition of overseas players playing for England one day and he is my favorite England cricketer of all time due to his sheer timing and the audaciousness he showed on a cricket field. We will get into the facts about this great player later on in this article. He played cricket for England for only 9 years from 2005-2014 and in those 9 years he made such an impact that he is still remembered as one of England’s best ever.
Kevin Pietersen was a rock star and he was extremely popular among all cricket fans around the world. He is one who made the switch but is famous as well as the reverse sweeps for sixes. He was 6 ft 4 inches in height which allowed him to get on top of the ball and hit it to all parts. So, let’s look at the Facts about Kevin Pietersen.
Facts about Kevin Pietersen
Just at the tender age of 17 he made his debut for Natal’s B team and interestingly he started as an off spinner but later developed into one of the most destructive batters.
Kevin Pietersen made the big switch from South Africa cricket to England cricket after he thought there was too much racism in South Africa cricket and he played for Nottinghamshire for 3 years and from there his journey started.
He had a great first season in county Cricket making 1275 runs at a very good average of 58 with 218* being his highest score and this brought him into the limelight for a future England call up.
Kevin Pietersen finally made his test debut in front of a hostile South Africa in 2004 but he used that to his advantage and smashed 454 runs in 5 matches and won the Man of the series award. In the process he hit the then fastest ODI hundred by an English player in just 69 balls.
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He had the perfect Ashes debut at Lord’s making.57 and 64* in both innings and became the 3rd England player to hit 50+ scores in his first 2 test innings at Lord’s .
He also made an incredible innings of 158 in which he hit 7 sixes thus making a record for most sixes hit in an Ashes innings by breaking the record of the great Ian Botham.
He made the fastest 1000 runs in ODI History in 21 innings equal to the great Viv Richards and he also the joint fastest to 2000 runs along with Zaheer Abbas at the time.
In the 2005 Ashes series he became just the second English batter to hit centuries in 3 successive Tear innings when he hit 158 vs Sri Lanka at Lord’s followed by 142 in the very next test at Edgbaston and finally that 158 bs Australia. After these 3 hundreds he entered the Top 10 batters rankings in Test cricket.
His career best series performance was in 2011 vs India where he made 533 runs with a 202* at Lord’s and finally a brilliant 175 at the Oval.
Kevin Pietersen was a millionaire in the 2009 IPL auction as he was the most expensive buy at $1.55 million by Delhi Daredevils at the time and he went on to even Captain that team.
He was the hero of the winning 2010 T20 World Cup winning campaign for England when he made 248 runs at a monster average of 62 and as a result he became the first English player to win a Man of the tournament award at an ICC event.
An interesting fact is that he is the quickest to reach 5000 test runs in terms of career span and he did it in just 4 years and 243 days.
He is also the only player to have won the ICC ODI player of the year and the ICC Emerging player of the year in 2005. A truly remarkable career achievement.
He played 104 Test Matches for England in which he scored 8181 runs at an average of 47.28 with 23 Test hundreds with a highest score of 227.
He also played 136 ODIs for England and he got 4440 runs at an average of 40.73 with 9 ODI Hundreds with a highest score of 130.
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