Kevin Pietersen has once again criticised county cricket in response to a tweet from the Barmy Army which shows Rory Burns bowling for Surrey in their County Championship clash with Warwickshire.
Burns, who has taken only two wickets in his career, bowled five overs of gentle medium pace in Warwickshire's second innings. And the Barmy Army shared a clip of Burns bowling on social media, writing: "Rory Burns bowling with his hair down on a cold April day in Birmingham. The County Championship is back"
Pietersen then quote tweeted the clip and wrote: "Hey world, this is County Cricket!" Pietersen has been highly critical of the state of county cricket in the wake of England's humiliating 4-0 Ashes defeat.
He believes the standard has fallen sharply since he first started playing and has called for a radical overhaul of the competition. "When I first started playing first-class cricket in England, the intensity of a County Championship match was like a Test match," he wrote in his Betway blog in December.
"It was as tough as anything. I learned my trade against some of the greatest players in the world every week. When I made 355* against Leicestershire in 2015, I would have made 250 without pads on. It was a moment when I realised just how far county cricket had fallen.
"With the money elsewhere in the game, the Championship in its current form is not fit to serve the Test team. The best players don’t want to play in it, so young English players aren’t learning from other greats like I did. Batters are being dismissed by average bowlers on poor wickets and the whole thing is spiralling.
"In The Hundred, the ECB have actually produced a competition with some sort of value. It is the best against the best, marketed properly, and the audience are engaged with it. They got new people to the games and I can tell you that the players will have improved markedly for featuring alongside other greats.
"It's such a valuable experience. They now need to introduce a similar franchise competition for red-ball cricket, whereby the best play against the best every single week. They would make money available to attract some of the best overseas players in the world and the top English players would benefit from playing alongside them.
"I can promise you that the current England team and lots of the best youngsters in the system still see Test cricket, in particular Ashes cricket, as the pinnacle. We need to produce lucrative, high-quality, interesting competitions that reward and improve the best players. This could be one."
