The past two weeks were supposed to be an exciting passage of play for English cricket. Instead they have been plagued by the petty and childish dialogue between Kevin Pietersen and the English Cricket Board (ECB), tarnishing what was supposed to be a marquee clash between England and South Africa.

From accusing fellow England players of creating a parody Twitter account, to sending inflammatory text messages to South African players about Andrew Strauss, the whole thing reads like a badly scripted soap opera.  But while KP’s rapport with the ECB has never exactly been an entente cordiale since his debut in 2004, one cannot help but feel his most recent exploits are the last straw.

If all the above is true, the ECB have, logically at least, done the right thing by disallowing Pietersen from playing in the ongoing Lord’s Test match. Such actions are damaging to team unity and as what KP did was unprofessional he should, quite rightly, be reprimanded.

But let us not go too far. Cricket is, thankfully, not always about applying legal protocol and institutional procedure. It is about flourishing by creating teams with balance, experience and quality.

And KP is quality. He might be brash, arrogant and even selfish. But no one can dispute that the man can play cricket. Let us be very clear about this: if Kevin Pietersen is not allowed to return to the English cricket set up, the only loser will be English cricket. 

Cast your mind back to the 29^th October 2011: a humid, sweltering Kolkata night where England need 121 runs to win the T20 against India on a slow, turning Bengal pitch.

England’s newcomers were out of their depth, unable to cope with the exotic doosras and carrom balls that featured in the sub-continent as was feared months before. Commentators called the T20 the conclusion of a miserable overseas tour and the painful hangover of the 2011 summer Test euphoria.They were wrong.  

Kevin Pietersen, like a generalissimo, confident and poised, strode out to the crease at number 3. In the space of 39 balls, he mauled his Indian counterparts with an explosive 53, complete with three KP authenticated sixes.The match after that was England’s: indeed their only victory in any format on tour.

In recent times, Kevin’s daring, imagination and will-power have been invaluable to England’s otherwise merely clinical line-up. It was his imperious century in Sri Lanka alone that allowed England to return home with some dignity after an annus horribilis of overseas cricket.  

In case you’ve missed the point, Kevin Pietersen is an undisputable asset for English cricket. At home he is destructive, and abroad he is dazzling. He brings an x-factor to the England set up, distinguishing himself as a veritable match winner. While England have been consistent and disciplined at home, they lack batsmen who can wrench games away from oppositions in the Sehwag or AB De Villiers mould. 

The other accusation hurled at Pietersen is that he would be much happier hitting sixes in the IPL and earn the fat pay checks, rather than graft in the England team. A balance certainly needs to be found and it is unrealistic for KP to expect regular England call-ups and play the full season of the Premier League. But as far as I am concerned, there is nothing wrong with a player wanting to earn money by playing the lucrative tournament while he is still young and has the talent to do so.

So, the complex dressing-room issues and the loss of trust between the England management and Pietersen are not problems that will be resolved overnight. Pietersen has made strides towards this in the past week, making himself completely available for all cricket formats for England, and is said to be meeting Strauss personally on Wednesday.

It will take time to forgive and forget the antagonism. But forgive and forget they must.

For losing Kevin Pietersen, a player whose skill and prowess is so obviously manifest, would be a terrible blow for cricket: a sport, like any other, that thrives only when the best players are on the field.

A few things combined this week in my lazy summer of watching sport to leave me feeling older than I am.

Twenty-one’s quite young to be set upon by that kind of thing, and I’m hardly going through a two decades premature mid-life crisis, but I had a palpable sense of a shift in how I watch sport.

The first thing that threw me was the Olympics. Now, this is by no means my abiding memory of the games – they were, as everyone has agreed, sublime, and that’s what will stay with me in years to come – but I couldn’t quite escape how bloody young everyone was.

Praise be to the venerable Nick Skelton, who nabbed an equestrian gold medal at 54, but everywhere else I looked there was blinding youth. Laura Trott and Philip Hindes, two of Team GB’s golden cyclists, are 20 and 19 respectively.

Taekwondo gold medallist Jade Jones only turned 19 in March. Lawrence Okoye the discus finalist – who for the sake of Division 2’s rugby players I hope defers his place at St. Peter’s another year to concentrate on athletics – is himself 20.

Watching Trott and Hindes bopping away to Taio Cruz’s Dynamite during the closing ceremony, looking for all the world like they were freshers in Bridge Bar & Club was all a bit much for me.

The next sporting reckoning was writing a piece about England’s chances in the forthcoming under-19 cricket World Cup. Not quite the ticket to make you feel sprightly. Researching tyros from Kent, Somerset prodigies and, most depressingly, an extremely talented lad from my home county of Essex, I began to feel like twenty-one may as well have been twice that.   

There was more. Earlier today in the Test match, during the lunch break, Sky showed an interview with England captain Andrew Strauss, who’s celebrating his 100^th Test.

The producer spliced this with footage of his century, on debut, in 2004. Remembering exactly where I was when that happened, and then realising that it had been eight years ago, was chastening.

When Strauss retires in a year or so there’ll be no remnants left of the England team I grew up watching – Gough and Caddick, Butcher, Hussain, Thorpe, Trescothick and Vaughan – and that seems odd still.

Who better to ask about all of this than my old man? The last time his contemporaries were making their England debuts was during the Cuban missile crisis, so it’s fair to say he’s gone through this a few times before.

Surely he would soothe my woes. “Don’t be daft,” he said. “It’s not like you ever had any chance whatsoever of playing professional sport, so I don’t see why it matters.” This is true, as far as it goes – though no marks for softening the blow – but it’s not quite what I was getting at. So I put my thinking cap on, and this is the best I’ve come up with:

When you’re younger than the sportsmen you’re watching then it’s true: as the Bowie song that LOCOG has played day after day and night after night would have it they’re heroes, examples to be emulated on and, if you credit the puritans who’d have had George Best on nicotine patches and Shloer, off the pitch. 

In 2003 children of our age wanted to be Jonny Wilkinson, or Thierry Henry. (Most kids of our age that is. I wanted to be Jason Leonard, or Tony Adams, two thoroughly unglamorous heroes but heroes all the same).

By the time you get older than the new stars, your relationship with sport has changed. I have no hopes of emulating Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. He’s a player to be admired, in a more abstract sense that’s different but not worse than my seven-year-old adulation of Marc Overmars.

The sportsmen at the top of their games while you grew up will retain a special status, but the fact that Agassi and Sampras were titans when I was ten doesn’t mean I can’t stand back and appreciate that men’s tennis in 2012 is an extraordinary feast of sport, as captivating as anything I’m likely to see in my lifetime.

So for now I’m relaxed again. Although my dad did have a bit more to say. “And anyway,” he added, “just you wait until the ones younger than you retire themselves. That’s being old.” Now that’s a thought that’s going to fester.

How will we remember London 2012?

Team GB’s own version of Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, created to celebrate their success at London  2012, was perhaps the perfect way to sum up two weeks of outstanding achievement that captivated a nation as we became a truly United Kingdom.

Prior to the Games, as NASA sent “a rocket ship to Mars”, security fears and empty seats suggested that London was quickly becoming “a satellite … out of control”, whilst the athletes were nothing but “sex machines ready to reload”.

However, as David Beckham carried the Olympic torch “burning through the sky” on its way to the Olympic Stadium, another flame of Olympic passion was ignited in the hearts of the British people and we watched on, awestruck, for two magnificent weeks as our McCartney-clad heroes claimed the highest British medal count since London first hosted the Games in 1908.

In decades time, people will no doubt remember where they were on ‘Super Saturday’, 4^th August 2012, when over 17 million people watched “Mister Farah-nheit”, Greg Rutherford and “supersonic woman” Jessica Ennis, “travelling at the speed of light” (almost) on their way to winning 3 gold medals in the space of 44 minutes.

Danny Boyle’s focusing of the opening ceremony around Caliban’s dream from The Tempest, marked the beginning of an Olympic Games that was as much about revolution as evolution.He paid tribute to British history, to the founding of our nation, but London 2012 was not born out of a desire to recapture London 1908, or indeed London 1948. His pointed celebrations of suffragism, the NHS and the subtle Beatles nod to the 1968 Games of Norman, Smith, and Carlos, emphasized what Rowan Atkinson’s take on the epochal Chariots of Fire beach-running scene humorously displayed.

These games were to be a celebration of the courage of protest and dissent, they were to be a truly modern celebration of sporting achievement, and, as Lord Coe put it, they were for everyone.

Vangelis’ ‘Chariots of Fire’ became the defining sound of London 2012, resonating throughout the various stadia arenas, and its story captures what, for me, the Games were really about.

When Hugh Hudson, director of Chariots of Fire, decided to use Vangelis’ eponymous score, he said, “I knew we needed a piece which was anachronistic to the period to give it a feel of modernity”.

Boyle’s ceremony captured Blake’s pleasant pastures and dark satanic mills in a technicolor 80,000 seat stadium; whilst the collocation of traditional landmarks with recently-inducted Olympic sports (Horse Guards Parade and Beach Volleyball, for example); and marathon route, which saw competitors racing past The Palace of Westminster, St. Paul’s Cathedral and The Tower of London, encapsulated exactly what Hudson sought to achieve thirty years previously.

Crucially, Coe’s Olympic vision was built upon the great phalanx of the British people, whom Boyle so wonderfully portrayed as the defining constant amidst his kaleidoscopic depiction of British history.

The body of 70,000 volunteers were very much, “the best of British”, and deserved every bit of grandeur in their title as ‘Games Makers’. In the past few weeks, London has lived up to its billing as the centre of an Isles of Wonder, but perhaps Miranda’s exclamation from Act V of The Tempest is more fitting:

“O, Wonder! How many goodly creatures there are here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in’t!”

Those most goodly of creatures, the Olympic athletes themselves, and in particular those from Team GB, put in some astonishing performances. Although only 29 world records were set, 4 fewer than in the Beijing 2008 Olympics, two thirds of the Beijing world records were set in the pool, with the advantage of vacuum-packed, ultra-aerodynamic swimsuits.

That those suits were banned in 2009 makes the 8 swimming world records that were broken in London even more impressive. Similarly, both the 4x100m men’s and women’s athletics world records were broken, with Jamaica and the USA becoming the first teams ever to break 37 and 41 seconds, respectively.

Importantly, in breaking the women’s world record, the Americans erased the final athletics record held by the former East Germany (41.37s set in 1985).

As the familiar faces of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt cemented their positions as Olympic legends, we saw the birth of new, previously lesser-known, Olympic heroes in Belgian-born Bradley Wiggins, Oregon-resident Mo Farah, and David Rudisha, whom the BBC dubbed ‘the greatest athlete you have never heard of’.

The prominence of Olympic poster-girls such as Missy Franklin, Jessica Ennis and Victoria Pendleton, combined with the fact that every competing nation had at least one female athlete for the first time ever, led to London 2012 being ascribed as the ‘Female Olympics’.

With this in mind, one can only wonder whether Lord Coe knew that Britain’s first and last medals of London 2012 would be won by Team GB’s modern-day Amazonians, Lizzie Armitstead and Samantha Murray.

This summer’s Olympics heralded a ‘brave new world’ of sporting achievement and opportunity for British  athletes, and, with the likes of Tom Daley, Laura Trott and Katarina Johnson-Thompson ready to lead the British challenge in Rio 2016, it seems the much-talked of ‘legacy’ is in safe hands.

Before the leaves of our golden summer fall to the ground though, let us stop for a moment and acknowledge that, as King Coe (or soon to be if his upward trajectory continues!) put it, “when our time came Britain, we did it right”.

Forget about the post-Olympic hangover and do as The Times’ Simon Barnes advises, “When you get an upgrade in life, spare no thought for the future. Just get as much of that free champagne down you as possible and live and love in the moment”.

On Tuesday, it was all going horribly wrong. At two o’clock, Great Britain’s world number one-ranked slalom canoeist David Florence paddled across the finishing line of the Lee Valley white water course and slumped over his splash deck – his time not even good enough to make the final.

Another favourite, another failure, another image of anguished disappointment to add to the back-page blow-ups that had already featured the famous faces of Cavendish, Adlington and Daley lost in silent recrimination.

The most arresting sight of all, of course, was the medal table. Great Britain sat behind Lithuania and Georgia; rivals like France and Korea had already established commanding leads. No-one was writing the Games off, but when every day brought countless reminders of the high price of a slow start, it seemed that critical momentum had been squandered.

And the thought, too horrifying to articulate, crossed our minds that home advantage might not be an advantage at all, but an insurmountable monolith of now-or-never pressure and expectation.

Yes, on Tuesday, it was all going horribly wrong.

So how on earth was it that on Saturday, we were incredulously acclaiming a gold rush of joyously relentless contagion, a runaway train of success that hurtled from rowing lake to velodrome to athletics stadium in a blur of cheers, tears and Union Jacks?

Six golds, each one a masterpiece (the word used by the eloquent Andy Triggs-Hodge to describe the performance of the men’s four), and most importantly, a giant Greg Rutherford-esque leap up the medal table to third.

The individual merits of each performance should not be overlooked, from the meteoric rise of rowing ingénues Kat Copeland and Sophie Hosking to the brave indefatigability of the aforementioned long jumper, who had overcome 17 hamstring tears.

But it was as a bravura shock-and-awe display of collective might that Super Saturday was most impressive: and underpinning it all was the characteristic virtue of delivery under pressure.

As cycling supremo David Brailsford has suggested, there is no magic to Team GB’s glittering successes, not even on days like Saturday. They are the result of a philosophy of rigour that relishes every aspect of performance, no matter how humdrum or nebulous, as an opportunity for improvement. Pressure is just another variable to be recognised, demystified and mastered.

The director of elite performance is Clive Woodward, a man who prepared his all-conquering rugby teams for battle by inscribing on the changing-room wall the initials TCUP: think clearly under pressure.

The imprint of that mantra has been visible in numerous British performances.

19-year-old Philip Hindes slid off his bike on his first Olympic ride, but in the final minutes later produced a 17.2-second first lap, his finest ever start, to propel the team sprinters to glory.

The showjumping team, under the almost unimaginably excruciating pressure of a jump-off, conjured a clear team round, a better performance than they or any other team had managed during the competition proper.

And what about Super Saturday’s Jessica Ennis, a paragon of serene excellence in the face of overwhelming public expectation. British athletes have seemingly decrypted sport’s kryptonite.

Look again at Team GB’s assured turnaround from a stuttering start to Saturday’s dazzling climax and we see simply the macroscopic version of the model each individual athlete has been drilled in for years: when the pressure increases, so too does the performance level.

For a nation used to watching its footballers wilt in high-intensity situations, these are truly days to savour. As we celebrate the abundance of precious metal hung around our Olympians’ necks, we should reflect that their mettle is more precious still.

When Labrinth sat down to pen his electro-dub monster hit Earthquake, it was probably not with the bombastic introduction of international table-tennis officials in mind.

Nevertheless, ping-pong’s blazer-and-clipboard brigade were treated to this tectonic soundtrack as they processed into an arena at the Excel Centre for the Olympic table-tennis competition.

The royalty cheques plopping onto Labrinth’s doormat, would not, sadly, be affixed with stamps bearing one of GB’s whiff-whaff wizkids, who departed the competition with predictable haste.

My father and I had paid £55 each to watch two-and-a-half hours of Olympic table-tennis at Docklands’ gargantuan venue.

When the action finally got underway, we were not exactly treated to an encounter for the ages. Taipei’s fifth seed Chuang Chih-Yuan faced the Romanian Adrian Crisan for a place in the men’s semis.

What the now-expectant crowd wanted was a fiery competitor to get behind, a Lleyton Hewitt of the miniature game, a snarling ping-pong pitbull.

Instead we got Crisan, a ploddingly lugubrious player with more of the air of an injured ruminent. The classier Chuang was only too happy to wield the metaphorical electric cattle-prod as he prevailed in straight sets, or in table tennis terms, about twenty minutes.

By now we were bracing ourselves for a seriously disappointing evening, especially as it became apparent that our two-and-a-half-hour session would yield only one further match.

In its staccato rhythm of thrust-and-counterthrust, table-tennis resembles no other Olympic sport quite so much as fencing. We had seen a one-sided knifing, what we wanted, nay needed, was a proper gladiatorial joust.

The PA announcer cleared his throat. “From Germany, please welcome the world Number 10, Dmitri Ovcharov!” This, immediately, was more promising, for here we had a protagonist with a name so full of Slavic Bond-villain menace that we were half-expecting him to emerge with a swivelly glass eye and a fluffy cat under one arm. We settled for a steely Teutonic glare. 

‘And from Denmark, former Olympic bronze medallist, Michael Maze!” Maze too caught our attention, an unapologetically athletic figure in a game that sometimes feels self-regardingly cerebral, bounding into the arena with McEnroe-esque sweatbands adorning his wrists and forehead. It was not to be the evening’s last taste of Superbrat.

The first set confirmed that we were in for a much tighter contest than the last, and thrillingly the characters of both players began to emerge. Ovcharov was the hotheaded aggressor, acclaiming each fizzing forehand winner with a skip and a yelp, like a scalded coyote.

Maze, more defensive, was a study in Nordic cool, his trendily stubbled features betraying no hint of delight or disappointment. The Carlsberg to Ovcharov’s currywurst; it was a rivalry of delicious contrasts.

There was one further ingredient that set the main course apart from the disappointing starter. Around the arena, in clusters of red and white, Danish and German fans were beginning to make themselves heard, chanting, drumming, yelling and stomping their raucous encouragement, a glorious cacophony of good-natured partisanship.

And in their enthusiasm they carried a good deal of the previously neutral crowd with them, whipping up a football stadium atmosphere of bubbling boisterousness, all focused upon a single nine feet by five table.

It was brilliantly surreal, like watching a stadium rock crowd deliriously acclaim a lone xypholonist.

The first set went to Ovcharov, 11-8, and Maze looked poise to level the tie when he held two set points at 10-8 in the second. The first he squandered with an overcooked backhand; the second was lost in a moment of ineffable drama. Maze served, Ovcharov flopped his return into the net, the Dane celebrated.

But then, from the umpire’s chair, a late and contentious call of let. In that theatrically suspenseful splitsecond, we read in the Dane’s previously inscrutable features the struggle between devil and angel.

With the unstoppable momentum that only a man making a really regrettable decision can possess, he drew back his paddle in a baseball slugger’s arc and fairly clobbered the still bouncing ball in the direction of the umpire.

Yellow card, point penalty, ten all. The next two points predictably went the way of the German too, and with them, surely, the match.

Maze retired to his corner and took his towel, a silent vortex of apoplexy swirling beneath the white terrycloth.

He was now a lone crusader against the injustices of an inimical world. If he had been a hero in an action movie, this would have been the moment where he leapt through the plate-glass window with a machine gun in each hand, Bon Jovi playing in the background, and started firing.

The reality was scarcely less dramatic. Winner after coruscating winner suddenly cracked off the Dane’s racket, now transformed into a weapon of such lethal force that we suddenly understood why they appear on the banned luggage list at airports. He took the third by the barely believable score of 11-1 and, the initiative thus electrifying seized, had the better of the next two tight sets, 11-9 both.

But back came Ovcharov, like all the best movie baddies infuriatingly hard to kill off. The German dug his fingernails into the cliff-face and clinched the sixth set with a swooping windmill forehand.

The Excel, a venue more used to hosting pie-charts and pinstripes, was transformed into a seething cauldron of Olympic passion, simmering with the breathless heat of sport at its high-stakes, high-tempo, high-class best.

The final act: set seven progressed to 8-8. After four years of sacrifice and toil, the victor would effectively be decided by a playground game of best-of-five. We were in the realm of Kipling, one heap of all your winnings risked on one turn of pitch-and-toss. 

This was the Olympics in the raw.

Two fabulously skilled competitors, dripping sweat, dreams on the line, a sport that could count its yearly column inches on the fingers of one hand playing to an enthralled and enthused packed house.

Ovcharov won it 11-9. At the moment of his triumph, I looked at the Danish fans massed in the row behind me.

They were still smiling. It was one of those nights.