Sunday Times
TELFORD VICE, Cape Town
CONTROVERSY followed Kevin Pietersen home to SA on Friday when his Twitter spat with former England teammate Ravi Bopara turned xenophobic.
SA-born Pietersen, whose explosive autobiography is testing the stiffness of the English cricket establishment’s upper lip, played in a star-studded sixes tournament in Johannesburg on Saturday.
On Thursday night, when he boarded his flight to SA, he posted a sarcastic message that labelled Bopara a bore: “... Awesome tweeting! Excellent for my sleep to Africa!”
Bopara responded with, “yeah I’m not surprised it’s putting u to sleep, u don’t have the brain capacity to understand, therefor u just shut down.”
When Pietersen pointed out that Bopara had misspelled the word therefore, Bopara called Pietersen patronising and advised him to “ ...just read your own book that should help u get some needed sleep on the flight”.
But, by Friday morning, the banter had turned brutal.
“Good job KP,” one of Pietersen’s 1.98-million followers posted. “Show that dumb immigrant who’s boss. Go back to Pakistan you Paki ... #curryeater”
Bopara, who was born in Forest Gate, London, tried to get Pietersen’s attention with, “Erm kev I think some people took it a bit too serious........”
But Pietersen had left that mess behind and moved on: “Good morning, Sawubona, Goeie More, South Africa...so good to be here!”
From there he segued swiftly onto the golf course at Royal Johannesburg and Kensington, where he played a round in the company of Jacques Kallis, Graeme Smith and Damien Martyn on Friday. All, like Pietersen, were involved in Saturday’s sixes tournament.
Other former stars listed to play in the charity event at the Old Edwardian Sports Club in Houghton were Gary Kirsten, Jonty Rhodes, Makhaya Ntini, Mark Boucher and Pat Symcox - a Pietersen family friend who leapt to the player’s defence.
“I very rarely have heard a cricketer say anything bad about him,” Symcox said. “I have only heard people saying he is misunderstood.
“I’ve never been on a cricket field with him, so I can’t say what he’s like when he walks over the rope but when you’re having a beer and a chat with him, talking about cricket and about life, I find him to be a hell of a nice bloke.”
The problem with Pietersen, Symcox said, was English cricket: “While he was making runs for England, it was always going to be OK. But with his personality and the English way and their personality, there was always going to be a clash.
“It’s a very staid society, certainly from a cricket perspective. Not in the soccer world, but in the cricketing world it’s a toffynosed set-up.
“Never in the history of cricket has an establishment been so taken on. Geoff Boycott and many others have taken them on, but never to this degree.”
Back in England, Pietersen would seem to be more misunderstood than ever in the wake of the release of his autobiography on October 9 in which he claims a bullying culture pervaded the dressingroom under former coach Andy Flower and senior player Matt Prior.
The book’s release in SA was “imminent” according to Jonathan Ball publicist Jean Pieters. It will sell at between R315 and R320.
The chapter titles reveal the tone of the book, which was ghosted by David Walsh, the renowned journalist whose dogged determination led to Lance Armstrong’s exposure as a drug cheat.
Chapter six is called, “Flower. As in Dour”. Pietersen describes the Zimbabwean who took England to the No. 1 test ranking as, “Contagiously sour. Infectiously dour. He could walk into a room and suck all the joy out of it in five seconds. Just a mood hoover. That’s how I came to think of him: a Mood Hoover.”
His nickname for hard man Prior was “the Big Cheese”. Chapter 20, therefore, is headed, “Le Grand Fromage”.
In 2012, Pietersen made disparaging comments about England’s then captain, Andrew Strauss, in text messages to members of the SA team touring the country at the time.
That controversy is covered under the title “Doos and dont’s of Textgate”. More South African-flavoured humour is to be had in chapter 13: “Say hello Poes, Say Goodbye Poes”.
The most stinging question asked of Pietersen so far during his efforts to promote the book has come from BBC talk show host Graham Norton.
“I want to put this nicely,” Norton said. “But reading the book, it strikes me that maybe, just maybe, team sport’s not for you?”
Not your best effort Telford, very misleading heading implying that somehow KP was involved in the controversial tweets when actually it was banter with Bopara which some small minded imbeciles picked up on and used to put across their own views.
KP did nothing to diffuse a controversy he was instrumental in creating - his conversation with Bopara was typical of the serial juvenile delinquency that has marred his career - and then, as the piece says, he simply left the mess behind. He could at least have made an attempt to clean up after himself.