4 min readUpdated: Mar 24, 2026 04:39 PM IST
Former England star Kevin Pietersen has revealed in a conversation with Jos Buttler how playing in the Indian Premier League and the friendship he forged during the league with Indian cricket legend Rahul Dravid “saved his career”.
Pietersen and Buttler were swapping tales of playing in the IPL for the YouTube show called “For The Love Of Cricket’, with the 19th season of the cash-rich league in a few days’ time.
“The biggest thing that transformed my career was my relationship with Rahul Dravid and the opportunity to call him when I was struggling with left-arm spin. When DRS came in, I was a front-foot player and it just created a whole lot of drama in my life for 9 to 12 months. And the IPL gave me the opportunity to call Dravid and say, ‘Dude, I need help,’” Pietersen said.
He then pointed at the now-viral email that Dravid had sent him. The story goes that Pietersen and Dravid shared the Royal Challengers Bengaluru dressing room for two years — 2009 and 2010 — during which the two became great friends. In 2010, after Pietersen endured a poor Test series against Bangladesh, he reached out to Dravid, who sent an email with notes on countering spinners.
“The email that he sent me — he’s just an absolute legend for doing that — I will again always be grateful for what the IPL gave me. It gave me a lot of controversy, I earned a lot of money there, but it also saved my career because I made relationships — trusting relationships — that I was able to call upon to give me that longevity in my career,” Pietersen added.
Pietersen spoke about how sharing a dressing room with stalwarts like Dravid, Anil Kumble, Jacques Kallis, Dale Steyn and a young Virat Kohli propelled to get better than he already was.
“Once I’d spent a little bit of time at RCB with Dravid, Kumble, Kallis, Steyn, Morkel, Taylor, and with a young Virat Kohli, I knew that was the place to be. If I wanted to get better, wanted to improve and wanted to be the best version of myself, I need to be mixing it with these guys,” Pietersen told Buttler.
Story continues below this ad
Pietersen also addressed the criticism that came his way for saying that he wanted to be part of franchise leagues.
“At that time, it wasn’t popular. It was ‘Pietersen is money hungry’… there’s all sorts of things they called me. Whereas now you guys (current England cricketers) are doing exactly what I did and I wanted to do because you know how much the IPL has bettered your cricket. Jacob Bethell said the other day the IPL and RCB helped him become the player that he is at the moment,” Pietersen said.
“The money was one thing, like I got paid a crazy amount of money. But the ECB kept pulling me out, so, I never made all that money. They said, ‘You’re only allowed there for two weeks and then you got to come back and play the Test matches.’ And that caused obviously the biggest rift—that was the breakdown in my relationship with the ECB. But at that time, all I wanted to do was spend time with Dravid, with Kumble, with Kallis. And I used to watch Kallis prepare and I was like, ‘Gosh.’ Then I used to sit there next to Dravid on the bus and talk to him.”
