The theory that Kevin Pietersen resigned the England captaincy to devote more energy to Dancing on Ice ought not to be lightly dismissed. Certainly the timing of his departure, merely 24 hours after Jessica Taylor, the batsman's wife, got the nod from the pro-celebrity ice dance selectors, is a coincidence that merits close analysis.

Power struggles, political infighting, disputes with backroom staff - everyone knows that those things come as standard around ITV's big Saturday-night year-opener. And if your husband were trying to be captain of the England cricket team at the same time, it would drastically limit the amount of support he was able to lend you while you tried to craft a path to the biggest pro-celebrity ice dance prize offered by television at present.

True, Pietersen hasn't yet quit England altogether. He will still, the assumption is, travel to the West Indies and play some part in the Test series there. But, relieved of the onerous responsibilities of leadership, he will have time to review tapes, listen to coaching reports, offer suggestions by phone and generally be the solid backbone without which a successful bid for ice dance glory is almost impossible to mount in the ultra-competitive context of 2009.

Plenty to chew on here for Graeme Le Saux. If he didn't know how seriously Taylor was taking Dancing on Ice this season, he does now. Le Saux for an ice dance triumph in 2009? It's well within the bounds of reason. And what a boost that would be for a sports world still hurting after the failure of Austin Healey in Strictly Come Dancing and that has to look all the way back to Mark Ramprakash in 2006 for a sports-based victory in a celebrity challenge “major”.

This column won't have been alone, I'm sure, in feeling its hopes quicken when news broke this week that the broadly smiling former Chelsea and England left back was ready to hand in his shoes at the counter and receive in exchange a pair of decade-old, broken-strapped and entirely blunt ice skates, freshly spritzed with watered-down aftershave. (Well, that's how it works at the rink near me.) We've been here before, of course, with Greg Rusedski, last year, only to experience crushing disappointment in the always-tricky “props” round. There, armed with a table, the former world No4 tennis player was guilty, literally, of vaulting ambition and crashed horribly, splintering our dreams and doing something fairly similar to the prop.

But what Le Saux brings to the ice - and what he may yet bring to Rusedski's table, if given the chance, and assuming it has been fixed in the interim - is a massive stock of valuable televisual experiences that the retired tennis star simply did not have.

Where Rusedski had dallied at the fringes of celebrity-led entertainment (a dip into celebrity Weakest Link here, a spot on Celebrity Stitch Up there), Le Saux has seen first-team action on Vernon Kay's Gameshow Marathon and backed the Rwandan mountain gorilla for Extinct, ITV's pro-celebrity conservation smackdown. If you can pull a whole gorilla out of the fire (as it were), then it is surely well within your capacity to manage a passable, ice-bound arabesque in the face of the tiresome bickering of Jason Gardiner on the judging panel.

Not that one should underestimate to any degree the physical challenge of ice dancing. Some of us still wince, a whole year later, to think of the speed with which Samantha Mumba, the singer and actress, unpicked the seam in the groin of her professional partner's trousers with her skate blade - a moment at which the programme was a fraction of an inch away from being in an entirely inappropriate time-slot.

But such is the muscular exertion that year on year drives Tony Gubba to an exquisite and, quite possibly, entirely improvised poetry. “That's the teapot, forwards then backwards, followed by the wooshka,” the former Match of the Day leftover goals man found himself saying during one of last year's routines - a sentence unparalleled in sporting commentary in the 21st century.

It's impossible to quantify how much a good run here would do for Le Saux's continuing quest for acceptance. Not for nothing was he inspired to subtitle his recent autobiography A Footballer Apart. This is a man who has had to cope for many, trying years with the snickering insinuation that he is (there is no other way of putting this) a Guardian reader.

Nobody should have to tolerate a personal accusation such as that and if Le Saux's appearance in a slashed shirt and sequinned bolero trousers nails, once and for all, these lies about his personal preferences, it will have been an appointment worth keeping.

There's no room for complacency, however, with unmistakable signals of earnest intent coming from the Pietersen camp. It's nothing to fear, though, Graeme. Bring on the teapot - backwards and forwards. Bring on the wooshka. Go, Soxy, go.