After blasting one of county cricket’s finest innings since Brian Lara’s peerless 501 not out twenty-one years ago, England’s all-time leading run scorer Kevin Pietersen had his hopes of a remarkable international return dashed – for now at least.

The England and Wales Cricket Board’s newest supremo, former-Ashes winning Captain Andrew Strauss, declared on Tuesday that the mercurial maverick was not part of his plans in “the short term” following a rather indiscreet meeting with Pietersen the evening prior.

Strauss’s exhaustive use of a lack of “trust” between the ECB, current senior players and Pietersen to justify the move undoubtedly irked the British cricket public at large, particularly with widespread disillusionment currently dominating the public perception of the national team.

And while Strauss and the ECB find it hard to trust Kevin Pietersen the man, surely they should be more concerned about trusting Kevin Pietersen the cricketer?

Pietersen himself has argued – in his Telegraph column – that trust is a “two-way thing”, and that he feels betrayed by many within English cricket’s governing body.

Chairman-elect Colin Graves appeared to open the door for Pietersen to return to the England fold, provided he scored County Championship runs, and lots of them. KP undoubtedly satisfied this criteria by smashing 355 not out at the Oval on Monday and Tuesday, a truly remarkable achievement considering the next highest score was Kumar Sangakkara’s 36.

In short, he’s done what has been asked of him, yet he was publically denied mere consideration for selection for the upcoming series versus an aggressive New Zealand outfit, and a frightful Ashes series looming large on the horizon.

Leaking the news just minutes following the meeting between Pietersen, Strauss and ECB Chief Executive Tom Harrison was not the wisest move either, allowing public rage to fester on social media overnight on Monday.

And unsurprisingly, the Surrey batsman rejected the insulting, piecemeal offer to serve in an advisory role to England’s one-day sides.

It’s safe to say the ECB’s handling of the long-running saga has been classless and careless.

Now of course Kevin Pietersen is not perfect, in fact I imagine he can be very difficult to be around at times. He burned bridges with the ill-advised release of his book last year, and has certainly made former colleagues resent him.

He also brings petulance, infuriating arrogance and occasional lapses in discipline, which are not qualities that the Strauss-school of captaincy and management adore, but there’s no such thing as low maintenance genius, and every effort should be made to accommodate rare talent if it drastically improves the prospect of success.

I have played cricket with a lot of very different blokes – albeit at the most amateurish of levels – and the reality is that not every player in a team can get along. Cliques tend to be unavoidable and some people are seemingly unbearable, but you put up with it on a Saturday afternoon if it makes the difference in a winning cause.

My interpretation of trust in the game of cricket is a knowledge that the man facing up twenty-two yards from me will give his best when the stakes are at their highest and the going is at its toughest, certain to not shirk the challenge.

Can Alistair Cook say this of Moeen Ali or Ben Stokes if they have to fend off messrs Harris, Starc and Johnson for six hours on day five of an Ashes Test Match? Not to take anything away from these fine, yet unproven talents, but the answer is no. The inexperience and untested ability – plus well-known struggles against short-pitched bowling – of these cricketers brings a degree of doubt and uncertainty on the field that certainly would not be as pervasive with a talent akin to Pietersen in their place.

And surely that is where trust matters the most in this fine sport, out in the middle, where personal baggage should be forgotten and characters stand up to the fiercest examinations of temperament.

KP is the owner of over 100 England Test Caps, and has 8181 runs to his name in Test Match cricket at an average of over 47, notching 23 hundreds in the process in addition to playing some of England’s finest ever innings, with the Oval in 2005, Adelaide in 2010 and Mumbai in 2012 the first few that come to mind, and the last twelve months have demonstrated that he is capable of similar achievements at the age of 34.

In the immediate wake of the saga, Pietersen suggested that Strauss utilised statistics in his reasoning for lengthening his exile, but irrefutably the numbers above speak louder than any equation that the former opening batsman can muster.

Credit Strauss for sticking to his guns and displaying great faith in his own opinion, but one does think that this is was an opportune chance for redemption and an Ashes lifeline that has been sightlessly dismissed.