I have no private access to the particulars of the current situation, but it seems likely that the impasse between Kevin Pietersen and the England management and team is not just a matter of the recent text messages (whatever they contained). It must have been an accumulation of factors, of situations, of mounting frustration and/or provocation. As Andrew Strauss said on Wednesday, there is a breakdown of trust, and the players and management have simply had enough. The texting must have been the last straw.

Impasses always in part reflect on the management and captaincy, for it is the job of leaders to get the best out of a team, especially from star players like Pietersen. On the other hand, there can be individuals who make life impossible and create situations that have simply gone too far to continue with. Sometimes the leaders or powers-that-be have failed over time to understand the difficult individual sufficiently to build trust and impress upon him that certain behaviour is unacceptable. But the other party to the dispute may be hell-bent on destructiveness, or on pushing his antagonist – enraged or despairing – to act.

Sometimes the impasse results from bad chemistry, each party to the conflict getting under the other's skin, pressing, as we say, the other's buttons, so that tiny pinpricks, as in domestic disputes and breakdowns, become infected wounds, even bones of contention.

In my experience cricket teams are full of strong and sometimes difficult characters, people who have the drive and ambition to succeed at the highest level and to sustain that success under the spotlight. It is often the rest of the team that can help to contain and make the most of such self-destructive and sometimes damaging characters. For instance, one resource for the insecure is to become a joker, to get attention by arousing laughter, by mocking those in authority or pretending not to care, and I have known teams refuse to go along with such actions or playacting, refraining from laughter at the individual's indiscipline or shenanigans, and refusing to be cowed by the latter's arrogance.

I had one long conversation with Pietersen in 2008, when he was captaining England, on a long plane journey between Chennai and Mohali. He struck me as more thoughtful and generous than I had expected. He commented that it had been a privilege to watch from close quarters the great Sachin Tendulkar score a hundred (an innings that had just won the recent Test match for India); he appreciated that cricket disasters (losing a Test match, for instance) bear no relation to real-life disaster (such as being severely disabled, like the young man whom the Indian team funded to follow their home matches all over the vast country). It seemed to me that he was willing to listen as well as to talk.

After seeing these last two of his three Test matches in charge, and after my long talk with him, I had some hopes of him as a captain. But then in what seems to be a characteristic piece of misjudgment he threw his chance away by trying to get the coach, Peter Moores, along with the then assistant coach, Andy Flower, sacked. The outcome was that Moores and he were, while Flower became the England coach.

Misjudgment seems to me to be one of Pietersen's main failings. I do not think he is malicious or in a deliberate way destructive. He is unable to control himself, words come out of his mouth (or on to his Twitter site) without a second thought. If any of us inflicted our stream of consciousness on the world at large, with no further reflection, no simple common sense in the form of a modicum of diplomacy and reticence, we would cut ridiculous or tricky or outrageous figures. I daresay he would have fared better in a time when there were no mobile phones, no tweeting, when foolish rants were more likely to be confined to the pillow or behind closed doors. He has been his own worst enemy.

My impression is that he is an insecure and divided person. Perhaps he needs more reassurance about his value and his standing – I remember being surprised (though I shouldn't have been) at how much praise some fine players needed, how much they benefited from being told (truthfully) how good they were. I imagine that his mood switches from high to low, so that he is liable either to be over the top, regarding himself as above reproach, untouchable, able to get away with anything, or else to be low, from which position he feels the need to build himself up, to excite himself by provoking responses, even negative ones.

Pietersen cannot resist drawing attention to himself (if that has been his aim, however unconsciously, he must have exceeded his hopes in the days leading up to the current match). But now he must be suddenly aware of how so much of that attention has been of the wrong kind; instead of the great charge given to him when striding out to bat for England, when going full throttle for the opposition bowling, he is off the big stage.

His replacement, Jonny Bairstow, showed terrific promise and presence in scoring 95, and his success has made us miss Pietersen less. However good the latter is – and he is remarkably good, a cricketing genius even, capable like no one else since the great Viv Richards of turning a game round through his own intense and powerful skills – he is now in the wings, off-stage, not forgotten but done without. He is not indispensable.

I suspect there is no stomach for easy rapprochement in the England set-up, and that it will be up to Pietersen to show some contrition and be willing to look at his own contribution to the difficulties before he is tolerated in the team, let alone welcomed back with open arms.