KEY POINTS:
Many years ago, a young English soccer professional at Stoke City was talking with his mates about their pay.
Not enough they all agreed. The bosses were too stingy by half. Right, said the young player, who subsequently made a decent career for himself in New Zealand. At the team meeting we'll make a stand. Are we all together in this lads?
Too right, came the collective reply. At the opportune moment, when the manager paused in his weekly rundown of the state of things, the young man cleared his throat and gave a passable, grown-up impersonation of Oliver Twist.
"Please sir, we want more money."
The manager eyed him a moment, looked round the dressing room and said, "right, all of you who agree stand up".
Our proud working class hero immediately got to his feet. Then he looked around and saw he was alone.
The moral of this tale, which Kevin Pietersen might ponder, is be very sure of your ground before making a stand.
As Andrew Strauss surveys the England room at Sabina Park on February 4, the opening day of the first test against the West Indies, he'll figure there are several players who don't reckon he should be in charge. Equally there will be those who figure he's better than the previous bloke, Pietersen, who was removed by the England and Wales Cricket Board this week.
If Pietersen and the man whose removal he worked so energetically to orchestrate, coach Peter Moores, ever sit down for a latte, for all their antipathy they might mutter to each other, "we made a right stuff up of that didn't we?".
Pietersen's biggest mistake was thinking he had more support in the dressing room than he actually did.
Pietersen thought, having sounded out his players, that he had their backing to get rid of Moores. Pietersen is an action man; Moores more the analytical type. Oil and water.
What Pietersen didn't realise was that some of those he thought were in his camp don't particularly like him.
Dressing rooms are never made up of exclusively like-minded personalities. Many inhabitants are linked only by the game they all happen to play.
England's squad is understood to be split into two factions, broadly the Pietersen camp and those who gather around the talismanic former skipper Andrew Flintoff.
The two men, the biggest personalities in the dressing room, don't gel, so sides are taken. And without question, the ECB will include people whose view of the captain would have been along the lines of "we're not having a South African telling us what to do".
"I've never encountered an ego quite like it in cricket," one senior member of the ECB told the Guardian newspaper.
Apparently Pietersen, not content with shoving Moores off the ledge, also wanted to be done with his assistant, former outstanding Zimbabwe wicketkeeper-batsman Andy Flower. That demolished a theory that Pietersen only has time for coaches who were top-class players.
And how will Pietersen the batsman, an exhilarating shotmaker with the ambition of destroying any attack he confronts in quick time, react in the Caribbean, where England have four tests and the usual block of ODIs?
Will he be big enough to look ahead rather than glance round the dressing room wondering who was hiding the knives? And what of Strauss? He'd be wise to watch his back too. Apparently, he's not everyone's cup of tea either.
What a shambles. Or, as they're saying in Australia, what a hoot.
