Kevin Pietersen’s list of must-dos for every up-and-coming international batsman

Making it as an international batsman can be really tough, but based on the success of his autobiography, Kevin Pietersen has put together a Dummies How To list to help young, aspiring batsmen all over the world.

1. When you start playing cricket, start off as a really average spin bowler and then complain about how you never got picked by your home country because of everything but your horrible bowling.

2. Leave your country and go play cricket somewhere else. Depending on your ambitions, you can aim big and either go for a well-known country or a smaller one like Kenya or Bermuda.

3. Forget bowling and start batting. Bat really well. Bat really well at Lord’s. Score a match-winning knock to keep the English press talking for years.

4. Release an autobiography. This is crucial since it will help with batting endorsements. And you will earn commission on every handgun sold to a resident of your native land. They will all hate you because you revealed the truth in your autobiography. Ignore them.

5. Keep batting really well. In fact, perform really well in an international tournament of sorts, preferably a World Cup.

6. Now you need to start losing form. You have to lose so much form that you are dropped by your national team. Get pissed off because you could have been playing for your IPL team in the Champions League. Couldn’t they have told you about this earlier?

7. Once dropped, complain about it in the public domain. Smoke signals, billboards or Twitter will all work. Use lots of exclamation marks to get your point across. You can even swear as you like, as long as you do something that will piss off your management. You have to make them really angry and then apologide with an absolutely ridiculous excuse. “I meant to make a fire for a braai” will work if you used smoke signals, “The billboard was meant to be designed so only colour blind people can see it” and “The Twitter update was meant to be a Direct Message” are all excellent excuses.

8. Try and prove your worth by crawling back to the country you kicked in the teeth almost a decade ago. This is to get crease time.

9. It’s important to get crease time and prove your worth, because if you don’t, you will lose your spot in the national side to a ginger leprechaun. Ginger leprechauns are everywhere these days. They want to take over the cricket world. You cannot allow this to happen.

10. Once you have returned to your parents’ house to play for the team of your boyhood dreams, you need score 36 runs and then spend about two days in the field. This is a great way to work on your batting. Fielding is as important to batting as strippers and text messages are to spin bowling. Keep in mind that you have to get out to a slow left-armer. This will show everybody that you have a kryptonite. It’s even better if the left-armer has a surname we can giggle about; something like Smutts is good.

11. Instead of hitting the nets while you are waiting to field, find stuff to complain about. It can be anything from how the grass stings your sensitive tush when you dive for a catch to the quality of DJs in the country. Anything goes as long as you slate your country of birth.

12. Go back to your adopted country, get ready for the Ashes and go score another match-winning knock so you can keep the English media talking for another 10 years.

13. Release an autobiography. Thank the team for whom you’ve scored 36 runs for the tremendous impact they had on your form.

14. Tweet about it. Make sure your tweets are filled with grammatical errors and exclamation marks.

15. Retire but come out of retirement at least twice before really retiring from all formats of the game.