THE BIG READ: Kevin Pietersen is sorely puzzled by his fall from favour, writes Simon Barnes

KEVIN Pietersen is suffering from an inferiority complex. He keeps thinking he's just the same as everybody else.

And it has devastated him. Dropped! Dropped from the England team that played Pakistan in a Twenty20 match yesterday. He was man of the series as England won the Twenty20 World Cup earlier this year, and these things mean a lot to Pietersen.

Now he has been dropped, and it is not a f*** up. It is a piece of deliberate policy. He has been singled out. Others who had an indifferent series with the bat against Pakistan were retained. In fact, being retained is the most obvious policy of the present England set-up. So much so that the not-retaining of Pietersen is a very powerful statement.

Pietersen's instantaneous and ill-advised lament on Twitter was the real f*** up, but it demonstrated the depth of his dismay. Ayrton Senna was once rebuked for some minor infraction of the racing driver's code. His response was not so much arrogance as bewilderment: "But I am Senna."

Pietersen has the same sense of self. He has always been a man in search not so much of victory as of greatness. He is not as other men are. He is in a team, yet not really a part of it. He tries, but he doesn't quite get it.

Pietersen reminds me of the actor who asked the director what he should do in the pauses.

"What pauses?"

"You know - when other people are speaking."

For Pietersen, a team is not so much something to be a member of as something to stand out from. He is Different From Other Boys - but that's why it is so important to be in a team. A person who is Different needs people to be different from.

Does that sound like a condemnation? It is not supposed to be anything of the kind. The history of team sports is littered with the nonconformists who played alongside all the good little fitter-inners.

Often the non-conformist is an essential part of the team balance. Many sports make a special role for the team non-conformist - and that is not an oxymoron at all.

Football teams, for example, have goalkeepers. Vladimir Nabokov, a goalkeeper, saw himself as "a fabulous, exotic being in an English footballer's disguise".

In many teams, in all kinds of positions, you can find a fabulous, exotic being. He is disguised as a team member but he has a different sense of self and destiny.

These exotic beings are not better or worse than fitter-inners.

They are just, as they love to point out, different. Sometimes the differences they feel within themselves play a huge part in the team's success.

Eric Cantona was the Kevin Pietersen of football. He turned up his collar to show he was Different. He had a special walk, with his shoulder blades touching. He came to Manchester United with a history of disrupting every team that he had belonged to, but at United he found his home. His perversities and arrogance were just what the club needed as they made the transition from title contenders to natural, inevitable champions.

Cantona made them feel different. Worthy. Entitled.

Cricket is a more complicated game than football, being at the same time a game between teams and a game between individuals.

Modern cricket emphasises the team-belonging, with all the huddles and the bonding exercises, but you are still on your own when the fast bowler charges in. Some cricketers will always see the game the other way round - as a game for individuals, in which the team is merely awarded the result. After all, who cares about the highest team score? It's the greatest individual innings that catches the imagination.

In cricket, it is Geoffrey Boycott that Pietersen most resembles. True, Boycott never set himself up as Different. But he and Pietersen played with the same mind, even if they looked different. Boycott emphasised orthodoxy and defensive discipline to a more or less pathological degree; Pietersen accentuates originality and attack. But they have far more in common than not: a sense of destiny, a sense of their own greatness, a tendency to disrupt teams.

Their teams are perpetually in two minds: whether to get rid of the potential troublemaker or to feast on his runs. Boycott was dropped by England for slow scoring; that is to say, setting personal achievement above the needs of the team. But when he had gone, England missed his runs and the value he placed on his own wicket.

Pietersen, having flounced out of Nottinghamshire, was discarded by Hampshire with public contempt. Hampshire then won the Friends Provident T20 without him, which proves that you don't necessarily need Pietersen's talent at county level. But if England had decided that Pietersen wasn't worth the bother they wouldn't be a leading team today. They wouldn't have won the Ashes in 2005, when Pietersen played his keynote innings against Brett Lee.

But it is neither Pietersen's singularity nor his disruptive nature that is the problem right now. He has not been dropped for disruption or for selfishness - he has been dropped for not scoring runs. His first-baller at Lord's last week, which followed his plaintive admission of his inner turmoil, was an innings of desperation.

Since Pietersen lost the England captaincy, he has lost his sense of his own greatness. He has lost his sense of destiny. To give his best, he needs to know that he is Different, Different because better.

But now, to his horror and disbelief, he is faced by the radical possibility that he is not a great cricketer after all. Just a very good one, one who loses form like everybody else.

It is a hard thing, to make the adjustment to being that little bit less than you thought you were.

Nevertheless, it is an adjustment that almost everybody has to make - everybody bar the odd genius.

Pietersen really did have genius within his grasp. There was a time when greatness seemed a real possibility. But over the past 18 months, that sense of entitlement has been stripped away, a process that led to that woeful self-parody of an innings at Lord's, facing a dire situation with a brain-addled swipe.

Pietersen has a choice. He can resign himself to not, after all, being at quite the highest level, and adjust accordingly - or he can become once again the genius to whom self-doubt was a stranger.

The Ashes are coming up again, and England want Pietersen back, as genius rather than high-class second-rater. That's why they went to the trouble of dropping him.

Since then, Pietersen has modelled himself on Saint Sebastian, an early Christian martyr. But what he needs is to re-find himself or redefine himself.

The trouble is that the most heavily self-obsessed people are frequently the lightest when it comes to self-knowledge. - © Sunday Times, London