Where does Pietersen stand among cricket's villains?

Of the many peculiarly British habits - chasing cheese down a hill, putting pickle in sandwiches, avoiding eye contact - one of the most enduring is the pantomime season.

Every Christmas, marginal celebrities scramble over each other to don their tights at a 400-seat theatre in a weather-beaten provincial town straight from a Morrissey lyric book, and every Christmas the British public continues to suffer and, sometimes, enjoy it.

What explains this attraction to pantomimes which, like turkey and The Towering Inferno, are considered perfectly fine at Christmas but not at any other time of the year? Maybe it is the chance to see Les Dennis play an ugly stepsister. More likely, though, is that it gives the great British public the chance to have a good boo and hiss at a villain.

Kevin Pietersen can attest to the British love of a villain. It is tough to think of an England cricketer who has been booed and hissed at with so much obvious relish as Pietersen. Douglas Jardine won more admirers than enemies in the UK for Bodyline; Geoff Boycott retained the backing of the majority of fans; Tony Greig's Test career was too brief for him to graduate to full villainy honours.

You have to go all of the way back to WG Grace to catch a true England villain. With a talent as big as his ego, that bumptious beard of his hid the sins of a cricketer whose gamesmanship was legendary - hiding the coin to win tosses, stuffing his pockets with ill-gotten gains from gambling on matches, kidnapping Australians, causing riots for not walking. He was the ultimate sporting rotter, and yet, a century on, it is hard to find a cricketer who has done more to increase the sport's appeal.

In the long line of cricketing villainy - and we are not talking about the real bad eggs like West Indies' Leslie Hylton, hanged for murdering his wife in 1955, or England's Chris Lewis, sentenced in 2009 to 13 years in jail for smuggling cocaine into the UK - Pietersen is, to steal his phrase, a bit of a Ned Flanders. A good cricketing villain needs to be a ball-tampering, match-fixing, ball-chucking, curfew-breaking, non-walking, opposition-pushing, batsmen-Mankading, team-mate-attacking, board-bashing, drug-taking, umpire-abusing son of a gun.

Pietersen musters a tick in barely two of those boxes. From England's Ted Pooley ending up behind bars for a bout of fisticuffs when he should have been playing in the first-ever Test match in Melbourne in 1877 right through to Shoaib Akhtar's list of misdemeanours (drug abuse, throwing a bottle into the crowd, smacking team-mate Mohammad Asif with a bat, chucking, having warty genitals - just the usual stuff), Pietersen can't compete. Among cricket's Goldfingers, Travis Bickles and Walter Whites he is merely a choirboy having a crafty cigarette round the back of the Lord's bike sheds. Even the saintly Sachin Tendulkar received a suspended ban after TV cameras caught him excavating the seam in a Test match in 2001.

Cricket, like any sport, is enriched by its bad boys and vigilantes. Grace, who hit only two Test centuries, is still remembered precisely because his character and appeal went beyond scoring runs or taking wickets. After all, the best villains are loved as much as they are loathed. The thuggery in those evocative, infamous photos of Michael Holding scissor-kicking the stumps at Dunedin, and of Javed Miandad brandishing his bat at Dennis Lillee in the Great Clash of the 'Taches at the WACA hasn't detracted from the esteem in which those players are held. Neither, it should be noted, has Miandad's aggravation of two players' revolts, or Lillee's physical intimidation of batsmen.

Australia's Clem Hill led his country and was one of the greatest batsmen at the beginning of the 20th century, but would barely be remembered if he hadn't stood up during a selection meeting in 1912 and told former player Peter McAlister: "You've been asking for a punch all night and I'll give you one", before attempting to throw him out of a window. Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis wouldn't have inspired so many fast bowlers without their sense for devilry and magic to go with their astonishing volume of wickets. Ian Botham and Ian Chappell's 37-year feud makes Arsene Wenger's and Jose Mourinho's push-and-shove practically embryonic. Sri Lanka's early successes as a young cricketing nation wouldn't have been possible without their confrontational, street-fighting captain Arjuna Ranatunga.

Would the deeds of Botham, Viv Richards, Shane Warne and Brian Lara have been so gripping without the roguery they all occasionally brought to the sport? Would their runs, their wickets, their impact have been as great without the combined tabloid front pages, the drugs, the benders, the fall-outs with boards, the text messages, the swagger, the High Court battles? In an era of stage-managed press conferences and micro-managed interviews, that sense of rebellion and mischief is badly missed.

Pietersen's is not a villainy formed of great transgressions but, at the moment, he is as far removed as you can get from the bland automatons that cricket is currently packaging and delivering. His detractors can't pick on any cheating or fighting, so instead they hold against him his apparent delusion and vanity, his slightly gauche manner and his polite but curiously charmless character. Exchanging abusive text messages about Andrew Strauss with the South African opposition and falling out with team-mates is as close as Pietersen really gets to competing with his villainous forefathers, but yet he has suffered more abuse than most.

Which is perhaps why Pietersen says in his book that "I was no villain". Yet it somehow suits him, this role of half England hero, half England villain. If ever there was a modern-day cricketer who lives by the saying that it is better to burn out than fade away - or it is better to guarantee yourself a lifetime of media work than playing Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty at the Tring Playhouse next Christmas - it is Pietersen. A slow decline into the past tense was never going to be his style. If he can't be the hero in everyone's eyes, then it's better to be the villain. At least, that way, he is still being spoken about.

And, like most cricketing villains, he certainly deserves to be talked about. Because, like the names already mentioned - Miandad, Holding, Chappell, Grace, Lara, Warne, Botham, Richards, Akram - Pietersen was a winner. Whether that was driven by self-interest or team-interest, it mattered not: on the field, Pietersen's mind was set on winning matches. He did this in a manner very few England cricketers have managed: by bringing matches alive, by inducing shivers in the crowd, by bullying the world's best bowlers. He was as much a man apart on the field as he was off it.

He was an electric eel in a goldfish bowl, energising a lazy passage of play with a switch-hit off Murali, or a daring dash down the track to Dale Steyn, or hooking Brett Lee into an incredulous, cheering Oval crowd. Like Grace, Pietersen has done more than any of his England contemporaries to increase cricket's broader appeal and to enrich the game.

At the moment, Pietersen's batting is sadly overshadowed by politics, sniping, half-truths and untruths. It is his fault as much as anyone's. Given the passage of time, though, and Pietersen's otherness, his stubbornness, his willingness to talk out of line, his showmanship will all be part of what made KP the most interesting and talked-about England cricketer of his generation.

Some fans - many of them - may have booed and hissed him, may have revelled in their outrage against him, but these indiscretions and warts (not, thankfully, of the Shoaib kind) might not place him anywhere near the top of cricket's long and varied list of villains, but they are all part of what has made him the rarest of sporting beasts: a great England cricketer.