'Kevin Pietersen's banishment gave me no pleasure – none at all,' says Hugh Morris

Former England Cricket managing director Hugh Morris says he took “no pleasure at all” from seeing Kevin Pietersen’s international career end with his acrimonious banishment from the England team, despite Pietersen making his feelings towards Morris graphically clear in his controversial autobiography.

In his book published last year, Pietersen says he was so angry to lose the England captaincy in January 2009 he called Morris “one weak prick” after being told by the then-managing director of England cricket that both he and coach Peter Moores, with whom he was in open disagreement, were being sacked.

Ironically, Morris – now chief executive at Glamorgan – was speaking as Pietersen was sitting in a dressing room only yards from his office at the Welsh county’s Cardiff headquarters, where he was launching his bid to regain his England place by playing for Surrey in the County Championship.

Morris declined to offer an opinion of the decision taken by his successor, Paul Downton – barely three months into the job – to end Pietersen’s England career in the wake of the Ashes whitewash in Australia, but was not surprised it was still being discussed.

“I wasn’t around for the end of that series, I didn’t know the circumstances around [the decision], so I don’t think it’s helpful for me to go into any detail,” he said.

“Kevin has had a very successful England career and scored more runs than any player who has played international cricket [for England]. He will always be a talking point. Clearly, we are still talking about him now”.

Morris stepped down – with three Ashes series wins and a World Twenty20 title on his watch – just before concerns over Pietersen’s disruptive effect on the England dressing room came to a head and he admitted he had been told many times since that he was “well out of it.”

“Lot’s of people have said that,” he said, adding that what happened subsequently “gave me no pleasure, I’ve got to say, none at all.

“But for me, the time was right to finish in 2013 and I’ve moved on and I’m really enjoying what I’m doing now.”

Downton himself has since been sacked following England’s poor performance at the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and the position he and Morris occupied is to be replaced by a new one with a narrower remit, focused solely on the senior men’s teams.

Morris sympathised with Downton’s plight and questioned whether he had paid the price for poor results rather than the management structure being at fault.

“The structure was very similar to the Cricket Australia model and the role of their general manager and performance director was the same as mine. Their results would suggest it worked.

“You are only as good as the people working under you. If you get high-quality people and you create the right environment you get the right results. You look at any successful team in any sport and it is not just the management doing well, it is the players, the coaches and the support staff.

“In professional sport, you are clearly judged by the results you have and recent results have not been helpful. I know Paul [Downton)] and on a human level he is a really nice bloke and he has had a tough time.

“When I finished in 2013, even though we had won 3-0 at home it was evident the Australians had got some momentum behind them. It was clear Darren Lehmann had done a really good job in galvanising them and the winter would be tough for us. But I didn’t see 5-0 at all, I don’t think anybody did.

“The scale of the loss was quite shocking in some regards and desperately disappointing and it’s clearly taken time to get that behind us.”

Morris, who was also at the helm during the ‘textgate’ affair in 2012, when Pietersen was dropped but then offered his ‘re-integration’ lifeline when his England career might have ended there, urged England to stick by Test captain Alastair Cook and said that his experience makes him optimistic that better times lie ahead.

“I haven’t spoken to Alastair for some time but he is an outstanding bloke, an outstanding cricketer. He has gone through a really tough time and he will come out of it.

“Sometimes you need to have a really tough time to appreciate the good times and sometimes to have a real fundamental change that is going to make a difference.

“In November 2008, for example, we had the Stanford match, then three weeks later the Mumbai bombings and two weeks after that the whole beginning of the KP-Moores issue. So we had a six-week period that was really challenging.

“But six months later, we won at the Ashes – that was the beginning of the Strauss-Flower era. It was a really dark period but a lot of good came from it.”