The chances are high that if you put former Manchester United footballer Roy Keane and cricketer Kevin Pietersen together in one room for too long, the room would eventually want to get out of them.
Without being privy to the inside of Keane’s mind, I am pretty confident that he would quickly size up Pietersen as a member of the prawn-sandwich eaters he so unflinchingly disparaged once.
Or at the least, a Chelsea supporter, which Pietersen happens to be, and which could be the same thing, really.
The pair have come together in an unintentional spiritual union during the last week, unleashing the kind of rage on the page that might keep alive the deadest of all literary endeavours – the truly relevant sporting autobiography.
Keane’s new book Second Half sounds like a written version of his venomous incident with Alf-Inge Haaland, the recipient of a studs-out, knee-high scythe.
Pietersen's new tome, KP, meanwhile, has all the preening and arrogant dismissiveness of his flamingo shot, diminishing the credentials of his one-time coach, Andy Flower, and teammate Matt Prior.
If these are the outpourings from the minds of two athletes who are successful and largely fulfilled, then the frustration and anger of those who somehow did not make it are not even worth thinking about. Those might burn the pages they are printed upon.
Because this is what has been easiest to overlook in all the coverage of their angst: the pair, difficult as they may have been for their managers to handle and teammates to endure, were immensely successful. They were also part of immensely successful sides.
In the burgeoning canon of difficult-to-handle sportsmen, these two were actually did well, and by the sound of it, you may not get that sense from their books.
Sure, their previous autobiographies have celebrated their highs, and there does remain something unfinished about both their businesses: Pietersen could arguably have played on for England, as Keane could have for Manchester United.
Both were serial winners. They achieved much, if not all, of what they set out to. Pietersen won multiple Ashes and even a rare world title for England. He is their highest international run-getter.
Keane won everything a club footballer can hope to win, most of it multiple times, some of it simultaneously. He did not just play for one of the most successful clubs of all time; he became, for a while, their improbable soul.
And they are this sour? Their discontent probably says many things, but one underscores an elemental truth about modern sports, its athletes and those who follow and live for it. That is, that this entire machine is insatiable. Nothing is ever enough for it.
There is no quenching its various thirsts for more, not that of the already-successful sportsman who wants more success, more fame or infamy, more money, more plaudits and power. Nor is it ever enough for the rest of us, who want more and more out of our sportsmen.
We want Pietersen and Keane to be more than a mere cricketer and a footballer. We want them to mean more than just winning and losing, which are, after all, pretty arbitrary and fluid ideas.
Where is the depth in those concepts, anyway? Somebody always wins and somebody always loses.
But we want to love Pietersen, or loathe him. We want to be reviled and scared by Keane's bluntness and rage. We want their obsessions and neuroses in front of us, alongside their beauty and their ugliness.
We want them to be awkward and difficult in trying to fit their individuality into collectives. We want them to be vengeful. We want them to be vindictive and jealous and petty and greedy because, well, that makes them easier to understand.
In simpler words, we want them to be us, or at least like us in some real, relatable way. So if these autobiographies come to be seen as an extravagant form of public revenge, then what is more human than the urge for payback?
And this is what the two books are ultimately telling us. Sometimes the games are actually the least of what we want from sport and its athletes.
osamidduin@thenational.ae
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