3 min readMay 6, 2026 07:22 PM IST
Jacob Bethell finds himself in the middle of a spat between two of England’s greatest batters without actually uttering a word himself. And surprise, surprise! It’s got to do with the IPL.
During the first few weeks of the tournament when the young England left-hander constantly sat on the bench for Royal Challengers Bengaluru, former captain Alastair Cook opined that Bethell would be better served by returning home and playing some county cricket to be in the best position to perform well for England when they play Test cricket next. Bethell famously scored a century in Sydney during the ill-fated Ashes tour. It’s the last Test the team has played.
Never the favourite child of the English cricket establishment, Pietersen countered that Bethell would benefit by being around some of the best players in the world and learning from them, even if he was not playing. For good measure, he added that Cook has “absolutely no idea what it’s like to be in the IPL.”
That was some weeks ago. Since then, Bethell has found a spot at the top of the RCB batting unit without setting the world on fire, as scores of 14, 20 and 5 would suggest.
But Cook hasn’t let the matter rest, suggesting there’s only so much a young player can learn without actually playing.
“I just gave my opinion and I can justify it by saying that at the time he wasn’t playing. Last year as well, he went to the IPL and didn’t play either, so he’s already had that benefit once or twice. In my opinion, he could have come back and actually played some cricket. Ironically, since all this has come out, he’s now played a bit,” Cook said on the Stick to Cricket podcast.
Pietersen has been a big advocate of the benefits of playing the IPL and was often at loggerheads with the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) over his priorities. Cook, a Test opener in the traditional, attritional mould, was never much of a T20 player and never featured in the IPL. He hinted that Pietersen championing the virtues of the most lucrative domestic competition in the world had more than just cricketing logic behind it.
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“Well, I get the other argument of learning from it, but there’s got to be a stage where you have to play, like you can’t just learn from it. And I know that the IPL is a great tournament but it’s also then no one’s publicly ever going to say that the IPL is not the place to be because everyone knows it lines everyone’s pockets,” he remarked.
Cook and Pietersen were teammates during one of England’s most successful periods in Test cricket but never seemed to warm up to each other too much. The latest spat, with a young England player being the inadvertent subject, may be another example of their contrasting worldviews.
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