MELBOURNE, Jan 10: The most successful international captain of all time, Steve Waugh has blamed Kevin Pietersen for taking English cricket a step backwards in a situation which he felt was “not so terrible”.

“Yes, I think so. It didn’t look like it was a terrible situation. It does take a while to work with someone. I mean you’re not just going to come on board as a captain and work smoothly and fit in exactly the way he wants,” the former Australian skipper was quoted as saying by the Herald Sun said. Pietersen quit the captaincy after leading England cricket team in just three Tests as he fell out with coach Peter Moores.

“There are probably six to 12 months at least, so there is that certain period of time where there’s a bit of adjustment needed. You’ve got to get used to the way people operate. So I think they really didn’t probably give each other enough of an opportunity to do that,” Waugh said.

The former Australian skipper, who led his team to most 40 wins out of the 53 Tests in which he was the captain between 1999 and 2004, said the entire issue was a setback for the English cricket. “In the end both people suffer. Kevin had to resign from the captaincy and Peter Moores has lost a coaching job, so no one’s a winner and it really puts England one step further back than they’d like to be,” he said.

Waugh, however, does not feel that Pietersen’s presence in the dressing room would affect the team.

“They’re pretty hard-nosed and thick-skinned and they’re used to a lot of these distractions around the team. They’ll get on with playing cricket and they’ll embrace him as a great, great batsman, which he is and I think it will be pretty soon forgotten and they’ll just get on with the job.”

Waugh also felt Pietersen may regain the captaincy in future.

“We all move on and in time he may well get another opportunity because a lot of people thought he was very good at what he did. He certainly gave spark to the job and he got a lot of people talking about Test match cricket in England, so there were certainly more things in his favour than against him,” he said.—Agencies