We need our prima donnas

What star cricketer Kevin Pietersen needed was a better captain.

I don't like Piers Morgan, a man who, as Peter Oborne put it in The Daily Telegraph last week, has made a living out of reporting on our "more or less worthless celebrity culture". But I think Morgan is right that it was a mistake to sack Kevin Pietersen. Oborne argues that Pietersen's selfish behaviour is typical of our times great cricketers of the past, like Colin Cowdrey, put their country first.

There is something in this, but I'm not convinced that Pietersen, in Oborne's words, "is a manifestation of the unqualified victory of neo-liberal market economics" over the past two or three decades. ("Neo-liberals," says Oborne, have little time for social institutions and "regard community, place and nation as worthless superstitions. Above all, they place the individual first.")

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