In your opinion awful captaincy. It actually one I tend to agree with, but this does not stop him being a nice guy. He genuinely seems to love his family and in the main has always seemed to be a decent human being. Maybe the KP thing wasn't great, but please don't pretend to think you know everything that went on because you read it in a newspaper.
I don't think he is a good captain and he has lost the ability to make big runs, but that wasn't the conversation. The conversation was about the decency of the players, which had caused a PC member to fall out of love with the English team.
You have almost instantly reverted to name calling because you don't rate him as a cricket player. As I said, the KP thing (if what was reported was true) was out of order, but in general he seems like a good bloke. I think the default for any human being is to defend yourself when your ability is put to task, so I don't agree with your other points as an argument for if he is a nice chap or not.
^^^ struggling to make much logical sense of this.
His betrayal of trust at a confidential team meeting is, iirc, fairly well established from testimony from a number of players, both pro and anti KP, and that alone is reasonably strong evidence that isn't a decent guy, and is a weak leader. You're right that we should be careful about second hand reports in these sorts of situations, but the provenance of this particular piece of evidence seems as strong as we can reasonably expect under the circumstances, and a betrayal of trust is absolutely the antithesis of decency. If we can't consider this sort of evidence then there's little basis for claiming anything about his decency, for or against.
His demand to keep KP out of the team is less reliable but it's circumstantial evidence, and seems a reasonable guess bearing in mind the range of other evidence pointing to the same conclusion.
His behaviour at press conferences is undeniable fact, and it seems inescapably true that saying "something must be done" to prevent further criticism of your captaincy is ridiculous. Defending yourself is one thing, demanding that criticism be quashed is absolutely something else, and it very much speaks to an underlying egocentric feeling of entitlement to his leadership position, and absolutely fits the classic profile of the response of a weak, egocentric leader to perceived challenges to his authority.
His criticism of the ECB decision to drop him before the WC is undeniable fact and fits the same pattern ; his record of failure with the bat in ODIs over a long period is undeniable ; the poor performances of the team under his leadership over a long period is undeniable ; thus his argument that he should have been retained as captain and player in this situation, and his wording of this statement in a way that suggests he was robbed of a job that he somehow deserved to keep despite these clear and obvious failings, is strong evidence of an unreasonable, egocentric sense of entitlement.
These are public statements, and thus primary evidence about the nature of his personality and leadership, and a hypothesis that it is part of a pattern evidencing a distasteful combination of weakness and ego and an absence of decency seems extremely reasonable.
The fact that he loves his family (I mean, wtf evidence is that? Some of the most reviled, murderous people in history loved their families) and seems nice at staged ECB events deliberately engineered to portray him as nice is a weak rebuttal, given the range of evidence against this conclusion.
Whether he's nice in his private life when under no pressure of perceived threat to his authority is another matter. I'm not commenting on his private affairs, although the fact that he enjoys shooting animals is something I find personally distasteful, and not much of an endorsement of his powers of empathy or spirit of fair play.
