England cricketer Kevin Pietersen has dismissed the cheating row that engulfed him during The Ashes against Australia in the summer.
Australian TV broadcaster Channel 9 named the 33-year-old as one of the batsmen from both sides who could have used special tape on their bats to prevent the detection of edges by Hot Spot, which is an infra-red imaging system that determines whether the ball has struck the batsman, the bat or the pad.
"I woke up one morning in the team hotel and my Twitter [feed] had just blown up," he told talkSPORT. "People were calling me a cheat and some horrible expletives and I didn't know what was going on. I had a look at it and saw they had broken the news at 6am [UK time] on Channel 9 and my image was used and referenced.
"I clearly denied it straight away on Twitter, and it was done and dusted from my mind. It didn't really bother me, I had a lot more things to worry about than the strapping on my bat. I've had the same strapping on my bat since 1995 when I became a professional.
"All the pros put fibreglass tape on their bat and I copied everyone else. Every cricketer in the world does it. It was ridiculous. It was just somebody being naughty and had no bearing on anything I did, and it won't in the future."
England won The Ashes 3-0.
