South Africa Test captain Graeme Smith believes Kevin Pietersen could end up regretting his decision to quit limited-overs cricket.
Pietersen announced his shock retirement from one-day and T20 cricket, after the England and Wales Cricket Board, refused to allow him to pick and choose his games.
That retirement meant Pietersen will miss England's defense of the World T20; the 32-year-old won the man of the tournament award in the previous tournament.
"It's impossible to know what you're giving up, and how hard it will hit you, until it's gone," Smith told online magazine Wisden EXTRA.
"One-day cricket has been a big part of his life for a very long time and, right now, he thinks he can just walk away from it.
"Maybe he can. But I think he'll quickly find there's a big hole in his life which isn't as easy to cope with as he may think."
While playing for his county side Surrey, Pietersen hinted he might come out of retirement if his workload was manageable. However, the ECB are standing firm on not allowing any player the luxury of picking and choosing which games to play.
"I don't have any inside information at all, so I'm just looking from the outside, but if there's any truth that his decision was partly based on the disagreements he had with the ECB and the way they treated him, then I believe he'll find it even harder to come to terms with the way his one-day career has ended.
"He just seemed to be back to his aggressive, attacking best, too. Very strange that he should give it away."
Smith, who stepped down from captaining the South African one-day side, however, revealed he has no plans of quitting any time soon. "He's just turned 32, only a bit older than me, but I reckon my best ODI form is ahead of me, not behind me.
"I'm very keen to play limited-overs cricket and I'm still very ambitious."
Smith is considered a bit unlucky to English captains, because the last two times Smith captained South Africa to tours to England, it led to the resignations of captains Nasser Hussain and Michael Vaughn. Smith hopes, he can complete a hat-trick with South African-born current English captain Andrew Strauss. "I could sense the pressure building on Strauss before the West Indies tour, and I couldn't help putting two and two together," Smith said.
"What if they had a bad series against the Windies and he didn't score many runs? But I'm pretty sure those two hundreds have made him safe now.
"He (Strauss) is obviously a very strong personality with that quiet determination that sees him getting things done and achieving things with the minimum of fuss. He seems to keep an iron fist in a velvet glove."
The three-match Test series will see the two best sides in the world play each other, and if South Africa beat England in their own backyard, the last team to do so four years back, they will become the new No 1 Test team in the world. "England are more disciplined, smarter and better prepared than four years ago, and all the players who are still around from the last series have got better," Smith observed.
"They are a very, very good team at home and deserve to be ranked No 1.
"But we have also got better and we're also pretty useful in English conditions. They have home advantage and they're ranked ahead of us, but I'm not going to compete for underdog status.
"If some people want to make us favourites then I'll take that as a compliment, not reject it."
