Some weary England cricketers returned home this week.

For us armchair fans it will seem weird not seeing them on our screens for a while, and some of the more greedy amongst us might even be saying- "We want more." But in reality the players thoroughly deserve a rest.

A long rest. The amount of time spent away from home by international cricketers is truly incredible. But not only that, it is the intensity and frequency of the cricket which must be exhausting. The old timers went away for six months at a time, taking the boat, but they were never playing the game at such a breakneck speed as the players of today are.

Many of the players who have been on tour for the duration looked tired towards the end, notably Michael Vaughan, Marcus Trescothick and Andrew Strauss, but one man who would have been wishing that the one day series would never come to an end was Kevin Pietersen.

I have praised him already but he surpassed all his previous achievements in the final match at Centurion last Sunday. This was the best of his three hundreds, coming in with England in dire straits and playing at first with the due care and attention that situation demanded.

Then he opened his not inconsiderable shoulders to show us some more big hitting. It deserved to be a match winning hundred.

There were some close games along the way but one cannot really complain about that scoreline. England were nowhere near their best throughout. Those three aforementioned batsmen badly underperformed leaving Pietersen to do too much for himself.

He responded magnificently but to win one day matches you need more than one batsman firing. You also need to be very sharp in the field.

England paid dearly for a couple of lapses when Graeme Smith was in the 50's during the third match at Port Elizabeth. Trescothick, skippering in place of Vaughan and with his mind clearly elsewhere, dropped a sitter at mid on and then Geraint Jones made a mess of a certain run out.

Smith went on to make a hundred and the series was all square when England really should have been 2-0 up. England never recovered from that.

I am glad that Pietersen is not now required to go to the United Arab Emirates and Sri Lanka with the England A team, as had been the original plan. That would have been a complete waste of time, with Pietersen having nothing to prove there. Instead Essex's Alastair Cook will go.

He is a left handed opener of some promise, who will learn much and hopefully make a name for himself. Whereas Pietersen will now look to make a name for himself in Test cricket.

The clamour for his inclusion will now be overwhelming, with even the normally conservative Duncan Fletcher admitting that he "must come into the equation." I have mentioned my reservations and was interested to hear Nasser Hussain saying on television last week that Pietersen recorded eleven ducks for Nottinghamshire last season.

Good players getting lots of noughts is not unusual- Mike Atherton is up there with the likes of Derek Underwood and Bob Willis amongst English batsmen who have managed most blobs in Test cricket- but it does reveal that Pietersen may be susceptible because of his unorthodox technique.

What is most worrying is that the bowlers Pietersen faced in county cricket last season will have been nowhere near as accurate and threatening as the Aussies will be.

I hope Pietersen does well, but I also hope that he is not built as the great white hope beforehand. Let's try and be realistic.

Mention of the A tour also brings me onto Glamorgan's Mike Powell who has gone to India to work on his playing of spin before he joins up with the rest of the England A (including, of course, his Glamorgan team mate, David Harrison) for their trip.

That will do him an enormous amount of good, as well as being an admirable initiative by the Academy management. I have always said that he needs to improve on his playing of spin, often looking a little leaden-footed, and too often favouring his strong leg side shots against the ball turning away from that direction.

But he has been working hard on his sweeping and I look forward to seeing the rewards next season when he returns, as well as hoping to hear of some good scores in the meantime.