AND NOW for the main event. England’s apparently interminable sparring with New Zealand is over and we can get on with some proper Test cricket. Whichever way you dress it up, however much the touring side might wish to play it down, next Thursday’s Lord’s Test is Round One of Kevin Pietersen v South Africa, the tastiest cricketing bout on these shores since the Ashes of 2005.

There has been so much water under the bridge, so much trash talk, so many ego clashes that this contest cannot fail to move. This will not be a goalless draw.

In one corner is KP himself, his star back in the ascendant after a moderate winter. In the other corner is Dale Steyn, the irresistible force of world cricket, the fresh-faced 90-mile-an-hour quick who has taken 78 Test wickets at 16 since the start of May last year and the rightful heir to Allan Donald’s “White Lightning” throne. Indeed, Daryll Cullinan, the former South African batsman, believes Steyn, 25, is better than Donald at the same age.

Bizarrely Steyn and Pietersen share a birthday (June 27) although KP is older by three years. His is the wicket Steyn wants, the wicket all of South Africa wants. “He’s everything you want to play against,” Steyn says in the next issue of The Wisden Cricketer. “He’s the kind of guy who won’t block six balls, that’s for sure. But then, if he hits the first five deliveries of my over for four and then gets out to the sixth, look who’s laughing.”

In this heavyweight contest, Steyn will be chivvied and encouraged by his “corner man”, Graeme Smith, the South African captain and a man described once by Pietersen as an “absolute muppet”. Smith claims to have mellowed and Pietersen himself is a married man with a sensible haircut, a far cry from the last of the Mohicans who took on the baying South African crowds three years ago.

Pietersen scored three one-day hundreds in six innings during that tempestuous series in January and February 2005, but was not on the winning side in any of those three games. He has shown the country of his birth that he can play, but now he needs to turn runs into results.

Steyn gets an unusually high percentage of his wickets bowled (22%), substantially more than Shaun Pollock, who castled only 14% of his 421 Test victims, and more still than Donald, who took 330 Test wickets, of which 19% were bowled. Pietersen has been bowled only nine times in 73 Test innings so something will have to give. As Steyn says, Pietersen is rarely in the mood to defend for long periods. He tends to fight fire with fire.

And Steyn is not the only one. South Africa come with a pack of fast men – Morne Morkel, Andre Nel and the warhorse Makhaya Ntini – to try to blow Pietersen’s house down, but only Ntini has played a Test in England. The million-rand question is whether the others have the nous and experience to bowl consistently – not just quickly – in English conditions. It is too close to call but you know one thing for sure, it will be worth watching.

John Stern is editor of The Wisden Cricketer

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