Imagine that your sports team is about to play a series of matches against the best team in the world, a team that completely annihilated your team the last time they met. You want to make sure that you give yourself a fighting chance of victory and so you naturally want to make sure that you utilise your full resources and pick the best players possible.

But what if your star player is a self-centred, egotist who has upset every dressing room he has been a part of and once even sent texts, criticising his own captain, to opposing team members in the middle of a series. When he was subsequently dropped he then wrote a book insulting some of his former team mates and coaches.

He has now regained some sparkling form and following some encouragement from the sport’s incompetent ruling body put himself forward for selection only to be snubbed by the sport’s director because of a “lack of trust”.

Should he be selected, in spite of everything, on the basis that his is a special talent and that he really does give his team a genuine chance of success or, should he be left well alone? That is the situation facing English cricket and former player, Kevin Pietersen.

It’s a difficult one but the bottom line is winning and ultimately, the team’s coach must pick the team that he thinks has the best chance of attaining that objective. That means picking the best available players and if one of those players happens to carry a lot of baggage, is obnoxious, arrogant, hard to handle and disloyal many would say “so what”. As long as the team wins are the supporters that bothered about the personalities of individual members of that team?