Anthony McGrath column

I would be surprised if we have seen the last of Kevin Pietersen in an England shirt.

Although this is a situation that will take some repairing, I’m sure it will blow over given time.

There’s been plenty of things that have happened through the ages, with players misbehaving or breaking team rules, but I just can’t see him never playing for England again. Look at Andrew Flintoff with his pedalo incident. That blew over pretty quickly.

One thing is for certain, all of this will make for a pretty difficult build-up to the Lord’s Test for England because it has become such a hot topic of conversation.

Now that it’s out in public that he has been sending derogatory texts about his team-mates to the opposition dressing room, it makes it very difficult to stop people surmising about what’s gone on and what’s going to happen, whether it be in the newspapers or in the commentary boxes.

If England lose, the result will be blamed on the build-up.

This is not really shocking news for me because it goes on all the time in dressing rooms up and down the country. Players don’t always get on.

When you talk about team spirit, you have to be close on the field and buy in to what the team’s trying to do. But there’s always occasions when two people don’t get on and the only thing they’ve got in common is the cricket.

Whether it’s having a go at someone in a text, in a bar or in a different clique in a dressing room, it’s nothing new. The major problem with this incident, however, is that it’s come out in public. That makes it difficult to manage.

Returning to Yorkshire matters, the club’s management and I have chatted about my future and have decided that we’ll wait until just before the end of the season to make any decisions.

I think they just want to see where we are in terms of what division we end up in and things like that.

I played in the seconds last week and had a decent week with both bat and ball, so hopefully I will be in the first team against Derby this week and can put in a performance that gives me a chance of playing for the rest of the season.