How England's Players Split Their Allegiances

Pietersen's camp

Kevin PietersenMichael VaughanPaul CollingwoodMonty Panesar

Michael Vaughan might not have played for England since he resigned in August, but he is far more than a shadowy presence in the background and a close friend of his feels he is the only figure in the current set-up who has the full respect of Andrew Flintoff. Yet, as long as he remains a non-player, the factions could struggle to overcome their differences. Vaughan shares more with Kevin Pietersen than may at first be apparent: a single-minded determination, a keen sense of his own worth, and a tendency towards the political, even if Vaughan plays the game more cutely than the man who replaced him. Crucially, Vaughan and Pietersen have a mutual dislike for Moores' over-analytical coaching methods. "That'll teach them to go with stats," Vaughan was allegedly heard to mutter at Headingley once Darren Pattinson's selection began to look like the aberration most felt it to be.

Paul Collingwood has always been close to Vaughan, which explains why, if only for a year, the two men tolerated the less-than-ideal splitting of the Test and one-day captaincies. Collingwood was also understood to have been wary of Moores' approach to the job and never forgot his loyalty to Duncan Fletcher.

Monty Panesar is not one to voice his thoughts regularly, a tendency also evident when he seems happy for his captain to set his field for him. But at 26, Panesar is just about old enough to remember an era when not everything in the dressing room was determined by computers. His slight exasperation with the Moores method suggests that, if pushed, he would have sided with Pietersen - although his opinion was not canvassed by Hugh Morris, the managing director of the England team, ahead of the ECB's conclusion that Pietersen had to go.

Flintoff's camp

Andrew FlintoffSteve HarmisonJimmy AndersonAlastair CookMatt Prior

When Pietersen took over the captaincy in August his attempts to tame Andrew Flintoff, the dressing room's biggest beast, by showering him with praise and promoting him to No5 in the one-day team were always likely to fail. Flintoff had never warmed to Pietersen's brashness and may have been put out when Pietersen privately backed Andrew Strauss for the Ashes captaincy in 2006-07. Flintoff got the job instead and duly presided over England's first 5-0 defeat by Australia since 1921.

Flintoff is also thought to have queried Pietersen's motives for returning to India following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai: was it for the good of the game or possibly the lure of a contract with the Indian Premier League? When it became known that Pietersen had taken his grievances about Peter Moores to Giles Clarke, the chairman of the ECB, Flintoff was equally unimpressed. After falling out with Duncan Fletcher during the disastrous Ashes and World Cup campaign two years ago, England's pivotal all-rounder had at last found a coach he felt he could work with - even if Moores and Flintoff, on the face of it, had little in common.

Flintoff's influence over others in the side is an open secret. Some would put this down to charisma, others to less healthy motives. One source who knows the dressing room well has described Steve Harmison as his "lapdog". Jimmy Anderson is a colleague of Flintoff's at Lancashire and good friends with Alastair Cook. In turn, Cook - a keen darts player on tour with both Harmison and Flintoff - is godfather to the youngest of Harmison's four children.

The allegiances of Matt Prior are harder to pin down, but he worked closely with Moores - a fellow wicket-keeper - at Sussex, and is said to be one of a small group of players who were unhappy at the way Pietersen tried to cajole his team-mates to return to India.

The neutrals

Andrew StraussIan BellGraeme SwannStuart Broad

Andrew Strauss is too straightforward and ingenuous a character to sit at Lord's, as he did yesterday during his first press conference in his latest incarnation as captain, and call Pietersen "a good mate of mine" without actually meaning it. That is not to say that he always agreed with Pietersen's style, which is a small galaxy away from Strauss's unhysterical and commonsense diplomacy.

Equally, he was put out when the ECB's desire for one captain in all formats of the game - Strauss has not played a one-day international for almost two years - persuaded them to give Pietersen the job last summer. But Strauss is not part of the Flintoff clique and may well have earned his accolade yesterday when Hugh Morris claimed the new captain enjoyed "the total respect of dressing rooms around the world". Of the current side, he is best placed to make Pietersen feel welcome again. Not so much a waverer, perhaps, as a conscious and considered fence-sitter.

The other three players have less influence. Ian Bell is not thought to have nailed his colors to the mast, even if he was initially skeptical about doing Pietersen's bidding and returning to India, and has always been held in high regard as a batsman by Moores. Graeme Swann enjoyed the fact that Pietersen plainly trusted him more than Panesar during the recent Test series in India, but, like Bell, was unsure at first about playing there. Stuart Broad shared Pietersen's feistiness, but probably owed his recall to the Test side at Mohali to Moores' decision to drop Steve Harmison - a swap that had also taken place during the tour of New Zealand.