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Kevin Pietersen highlights the dangers of impulsive Tweeting

Sport

Forget the Pakistan controversy, the eyes of the cricketing world have been much closer to home this afternoon after it emerged that England cricket star Kevin Pietersen angrily announced his axe from the England squad via Twitter.

The mysterious post, which has since been removed, apparently read ‘Done for the rest of summer!! Man of the World Cup T20 and dropped from the T20 side too. It’s a...’, well we won’t write what he wrote for this is not the place for such language, but suffice to say it would knock innocent ears for six.

Pietersen’s rant came just hours before the England squad was due to be announced for the forthcoming Twenty20 international against Pakistan. According to an article on the Guardian Sports pages this afternoon, the England and Wales Cricket Board has recently issued strict instructions to all players to use Twitter in a responsible fashion.

I’m not a huge follower of cricket but it doesn’t take much poking around to find evidence of other misuse of the social networking site. Just last month, the board suspended England under-19 captain Azeem Rafiq from all cricket under its jurisdiction for one month after a Twitter tirade against manager John Abrahams.

Impulsive tweeting has been commonplace in the sporting world and has led to a number of wrist-slapping incidents. A number of sporting bodies have tried to control the use of social networking sites either by imposing a full on ban on sportsmen using platforms such as Twitter or by exercising editorial guidelines on what athletes can and cannot talk about. Such measures are not so much dictatorial as they are common sense rules, effectively the same as reputational clauses in employment contracts. If I were to write things about my employment on my personal Twitter account, I would expect there to be repercussions, but it seems that sites like Twitter are not treated with the care and attention that, say, emails would be.

Kevin Pietersen may have inadvertently written his tweet to all of his followers when he meant to be direct messaging somebody, or he may just have switched off his common sense filter when his ego had been dented. Whatever the reason, it serves as a timely reminder that Twitter is not a private conversation or a venting platform to control emotions, it is a public-facing communications tool that amplifies messages to an eager and captive audience. The repercussions for misuse can be far reaching and, as Kevin Pietersen will today have learned, are not easily deleted.

(CH)

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