So what if Kevin Pietersen is greedy? As long as he scores

Yamile Aldama, the erstwhile Cuban triple jumper now snugly ensconced in a Team GB vest, this week wondered why it is that people are getting so exercised about the nationality of our Olympic athletes. Especially when we cheerfully welcome anyone from anywhere into our cricket team. How come, she wanted to know, everyone calls me a 'Plastic Brit' when Kevin Pietersen will be cheered to the echo when he turns out for England at the Kia Oval today?

It is a question which regularly exercises today's opponents, too. Pietersen, the South Africans have long claimed, is the ultimate carpetbagger, a mercenary driven by the basest of personal preoccupations. In a game in which representing your country is the pinnacle, he turned his back on the opportunity millions would give several limbs to attain and stomped off elsewhere. Worse, he dressed up his explanation to seek a career with England rather than the nation of his birth in the language of victimhood, largely to disguise his true, monetary motivation. Just watch out, they endlessly suggest, he will do the same to you one day.

And indeed, this season KP has been cheerfully playing up to the type characterised by those South Africans who love to barrack him at every turn. His demands of the England management have been almost comical in their transparency. First he said he wished to retire from all forms of the foreshortened game to spend more time with his young family. A sensitive enough proposition, you might think. Except he then undermined it by saying, actually he would be prepared to turn out for the England one-day and Twenty20 sides provided he could have time off from Test matches if they were scheduled at the same time as Indian Premier League fixtures, where, by happy coincidence, he could earn north of pounds 1?million a season. Revealingly, his priorities appeared to have shifted, from a keenness to play the family man, to an anxiety to buff up his current account.

It was a negotiating ploy the England management - seemingly increasingly irritated by their man's money-driven self-obsession - neatly withdrew the carpet from underneath by refusing to name him in their provisional squad for the World Twenty20 competition in the autumn. And this despite the fact that Pietersen - a winner with England the last time they engaged in such competition - is rather good at thwack and rush.

Yet, despite all the evidence, despite his comical affection for the folding stuff, despite his bold attempts to make a team game subservient to his own personal needs, it is likely that Aldama and all those South African detractors will be driven to further fury over the forthcoming weekend. Far from chants of 'one greedy bastard' echoing around the Oval, Pietersen will more than likely receive his usual wholehearted reception from the Barmy Army. Why? Because for all his evident materialism, Pietersen does something rather important: he delivers for the fans, the very people who pay his wages. And they find him rather good value.

He is one of those rare cricketers who empties the stadium bars the moment he walks out to bat. Watching him stride out swinging his club brings a visceral charge to everyone lucky enough to be there to witness it. Sure, sometimes he disappoints, heaving wildly and inappropriately. But more often - particularly when it matters - he produces, transforming an afternoon at the cricket into something to be replayed endlessly in future in the mental cinema. Frankly, we fans will forgive any man who clears the boundary at long on.

That is the thing about sporting heroes: they are ours when they deliver. Heroism is earned on the pitch, not in the personality parade. It will be the same in the England dressing room. Never mind that the man who already earns far more than any of his contemporaries is attempting to rewrite the calendar in order to further his own financial arrangements, if he smacks Dale Steyn for a couple of sixes on his way to a match-winning century, as far as his team-mates are concerned he can name his own price.

Jimmy Anderson put it perfectly this week. "Generally, when Kevin is making the headlines he tends to play very well," the fast bowler said. "So hopefully he will continue the form he has shown this summer and get us some big runs we will need in the middle order." And this is the oddity about Pietersen, the characteristic that distinguishes him from other sportsmen who are distracted by the lure of cash: if there is one thing that he enjoys more than money, it is the glory that comes from playing cricket. He is not a player who shirks. He is not the Carlos Tevez of cricket. Even when he found himself failing in the England captaincy, he did not run from the game or hide. He knuckled down and carried on.

Yes, that was largely because he realised that without the shop window of the game he would not be able to continue snuffling into cricket's brim-full trough. Yes, he has been clinical in his ability to put a financial spin on his career. Yes, as he himself once shouted across a bar in St Lucia when talking about the IPL: "Never mind the quality, smell the money."

But from the fans' point of view his ultimate motivation doesn't matter as long as he does the business. Indeed, we in the stands will demonstrate little alarm at his latest asinine manoeuvring. Playing his kind of brinkmanship, demolishing alliances at every turn, making enemies of all in authority, even a man as rhino-skinned as KP must know there is only one way he can survive in the shop window of Test cricket: play so well he cannot be dropped.

Now he has painted himself into a corner, he has only one way to advance. Which is why Yamile Aldama might be advised to hold on to her Union Flag hat if she tunes in to watch her fellow flier of a flag-of-convenience in action this weekend: KP needs to produce some fireworks.