A clash of characters

	No longer shoulder to shoulder? Kevin Pietersen and Peter Moores have struggled to work together © Getty Images

Without the influence of Kevin Pietersen the England team probably wouldn't have turned around and flown back to India. Now he seems ready to set out a new direction for the whole of English cricket. If he forces the ECB to act over the position of Peter Moores then it will confirm he is England's most powerful captain, while making the India u-turn appear like a mini-roundabout.

At the centre is a clash between two very different characters. On the one hand is the outgoing, single-minded and brash Pietersen who rides on his instincts and makes the most of his natural talents. On the other is Moores, a coach who does things by the manual and with the aid of every conceivable piece of technology. Now, it seems, the two extremes have reached breaking point and Hugh Morris, who himself gained many plaudits in the aftermath of Mumbai, is put in the position of having to negotiate a solution. If Morris doesn't want to set a dangerous precedent he will have to be equally diplomatic this time.

Pietersen only agreed to the captaincy after a long discussion with Moores the day the leadership changed hands, and this latest situation appears to centre on Michael Vaughan's omission from the West Indies tour squad as England persist with Owais Shah and Ian Bell. The team can't afford a disaffected Pietersen and if he isn't allowed to do it his way he won't want to do it. He didn't chase the role, but never has a captain wielded more power. He knows what he wants to achieve and believes everyone else should follow the same path. And in Moores he sees someone who is holding the team back.

As well as having talent and drive by the bucket load, Pietersen is also very smart. He realises he is short of captaincy experience and admitted that he would have to learn quickly when he accepted the role. In Chennai, as India chased 387, he was found wanting and unsure how to set his fields. It was a situation Vaughan would have excelled at. Pietersen knows this, and his desire to have Vaughan in the Caribbean was no doubt to help his tactical game.

Moores, it appears, managed to veto the recall during a long selection meeting while Pietersen was on holiday. No doubt he will have looked at Vaughan's statistics over the last 12 months - 363 runs at 24.20 - and decided he wasn't worth his place. To him, coaching (and selection, even though Geoff Miller has the final say) is a more black-and-white operation than it is for Pietersen and was for the previous set-up of Vaughan and Duncan Fletcher. He is a big fan of his statistics, constantly talking about England's top six averaging over 40 when their short-term returns have been much lower, and although occasionally that instinct has served him well it has also proved a weakness.

He was quick to look at the county game to bolster England's resources and Ryan Sidebottom was his major success story, but it isn't always possible to judge on numbers alone, otherwise Vaughan and Marcus Trescothick would never had had successful Test careers. Darren Pattinson's selection against South Africa was a prime example; it was a very 1990s pick of someone who'd had a good few weeks in county cricket. It was the most pragmatic of solutions and drove a wedge between Moores and Vaughan, which has now spilled into the Pietersen era.

One of the problems for Moores was, when he took charge following the 2007 World Cup, there were the loud calls for something new and fresh. Moores, though, came into the job unopposed following the Schofield Report and was one of a host of what were criticised as 'jobs for the boys' as the ECB, who rate Moores highly, recruited from within.

When Pietersen took over he knew who he wanted in his team; Steve Harmison was recalled and Andrew Flintoff batted at No. 6. It was an attacking line-up to match an attacking mindset, but Moores has always struggled to handle Harmison and would probably be happier with Flintoff at No. 7.

Moores wants to surround himself with young players he can mould in his style of geometrics, biomechanics and laptops. Some of the pace bowlers have developed under his watch, notably James Anderson and Stuart Broad, although that is also down to Ottis Gibson, the bowling coach. As the England set-up has had a string of specialist quick-bowling coaches, going back to Troy Cooley and briefly through Allan Donald to Gibson, the head coach has focussed more on the batsmen.

Fletcher had some notable success in this area, introducing the forward press that served many players well on the subcontinent. It is difficult to see how the batsmen have developed under Moores. England's two major successes in India were Pietersen and Andrew Strauss. Strauss remodelled his game while away from the England set-up and Pietersen, in everything he does, is his own man and almost coaches himself. Would any gameplan drawn up by Moores allow for the freestyle switch-hitting that almost brought England back into contention in Mohali?

Where Moores's lack of impact has been more noticeable is with the young batsmen. Bell, and to a lesser extent Alastair Cook, have failed to kick on their careers over the last 12 months while Ravi Bopara is threatening to become an enigma. Of course, not all of this is the coach's fault. He doesn't miss straight balls for Bell or make Cook try to slog-sweep sixes (although trying to make him a one-day batsman won't have helped), but coupled with the decline of Monty Panesar it shows a trend. Their heads have been filled with too much information whereas Fletcher was a great coach for standing back and just watching before making his point.

Moores is from the modern school of coached coaches, ones who have all the certificates, have learnt what the manual says about the job and what biomechanics mean. That isn't necessarily the wrong way to do it, but at international level coaching is also about flexibility. Look, for example, at how Gary Kirsten has learnt to allow the senior India players to do things their own way and he also works alongside a very single-minded and driven captain in Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Crucially, though, the bond between captain and coach is strong and they understand each other.

How different this situation might be if England had defended 387 in Chennai and come away with a series win in India is difficult to say, but the tensions were around long before the team returned for the Test series. In 19 days they board another flight, this time bound for West Indies, to begin nine months of cricket that could define this era of English cricket. The biggest challenge of this year was meant to be the Ashes, but unless the captain can work with the coach it won't matter how many problems the Australians have.