LONDON: Former England captain Alec Stewart said on Wednesday Kevin Pietersen had been right to complain of England players’ Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann and Tim Bresnan’s access to a parody Twitter account mocking the star batsman.

Pietersen, in a heavily-trailed autobiography which is on general sale on Thursday, has written of a ‘bullying’ culture during his time within the England dressing room.

In particular, he did not take kindly to the ‘KPgenius’ Twitter account owned by Richard Bailey, a friend of England paceman Stuart Broad.

Pietersen’s book states Bailey told Stewart he had insider help with the account.

However, Bailey has persistently denied this and on Wednesday he again insisted no England players had been involved, telling the Guardian: “They 100 per cent did not tweet it.”

But Stewart, South Africa-born Pietersen’s coach at county side Surrey, contradicted Bailey’s denial.

“The reason I am prepared to talk about is that he [Bailey] has said he didn’t say anything to me and therefore is doubting my integrity and I won’t have that,” Stewart explained in an interview with BBC Radio Five on Wednesday.

“I’m not here to nail Pietersen, Broad, Swann, Bresnan. I’m an ex-England player and an England fan.

“What happened, back in 2012 at The Oval, this gentleman (Bailey) came up and said to me: ‘I understand you follow the KPgenius twitter account’.

“I said ‘yes, some of it is funny, some of it is close to the bone’. He then said ‘that is me’, I said ‘very good, well done’. He then came back and said, ‘can I keep a secret?’, I said ‘yes, but it depends what you’re going to tell me’.

“He said ‘I can’t tell you’ and then walked away. Thirty seconds later he came back and said ‘three players have access to the account, they have the password’ and he told me the three names.

“The names were Bresnan, Broad and Swann and it didn’t sit comfortably with me,” added Stewart, England’s most-capped player.

Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2014