Just as no film director in Hollywood ever went broke through underestimating the intelligence of his audience, so no journalist will ever lose his job by writing about Kevin Pietersen.

In form, out of form or even in between, Pietersen will always make a good headline as long as there is a mouth to feed a few quotes. And so it was that Andrew Strauss found himself talking about a familiar subject on the eve of the second npower Test.

The England captain was effusive. He had to be. At various stages he suggested that Pietersen “is going to have a strong summer for us”, “is in very good form”, and “is in a good place mentally” (Lord’s, you would hope.) With such disregard for evidence, Strauss would not make much of a detective.

A more neutral view came from Michael Vaughan. Having spent more hours than he cares to recall on the surgeon’s slab, Vaughan ought to be a dab hand with the scalpel. In a dissection of Peterson’s technique, on Friday morning, he used a photograph from nets on Thursday to show how wrongly positioned feet and hips are causing Pietersen to reach for balls outside off stump.

The context was the well-documented record against left-arm spin. These bowlers had dismissed Pietersen in 19 of his 57 innings before Friday. England lost their second wicket after 34 balls Friday and Tillekeratne Dilshan could only regret that the laws did not allow him to make a bowling change midway through the over. Another way of looking at the statistic is that Pietersen has been dismissed by bowlers, who are not left-arm spinners in 38 of those 57 innings.