“I Think There Was A Lot Of Jealousy” – Michael Vaughan Talks About Kevin Pietersen’s IPL Contract

Michael Vaughan, the former captain of the England team, has certain strong opinions of Kevin Pietersen’s comeback following the 2012 text controversy.

Michael Vaughan talks about the fallout between Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Strauss

What happened was Kevin Pietersen was accused of sending text messages to the South African players about Andrew Strauss. When this came out in the open, Pietersen was struck off from the 2012 team which was playing against the Proteas at Lords.

Michael Vaughan says, “It had a huge effect on English cricket for a while and I still think it has a massive effect on a few individuals. I still think there are a few who have come out of this worse“, to fox sports.com.au.

Now, Vaughan feels that if indeed Kevin Pietersen sent messages on how to dismiss Andrew Strauss, then he should have never played for the England team again.

The former England skipper says numerous negativity stemmed from jealousy

On the other hand, Michael Vaughan also talks about the impact that Kevin Pietersen’s multi-million dollar IPL contract had. Pietersen secures a $1.55 million dollar contract with Royal Challengers Bangalore. This got his teammates thinking he was choosing money over the national team.

“There were all sorts of whispers and rumours of cliques in the team. There was a little band of a few; Graeme Swann, Tim Bresnan, (James) Anderson, (Stuart) Broad and Matt Prior. The whispers were they were on one side and Kevin was kind of standing on his own on the other side.“

Michael Vaughan also says that even though no one will accept it now, but it was mostly jealousy. Kevin Pietersen had secured a multi-million dollar contract while the other players of the team weren’t even getting a sniff from the Indian Premier League franchises.

“I think there was a lot of jealousy. And the players will completely deny it now but I think there was at the time when Kevin was on a massive contract.“