Steven Pienaar hangs his boots

CAPE TOWN. — After announcing his retirement from football on Wednesday, Steven Pienaar revealed that waking up at 7am for Bidvest Wits training was part of the cause of his decision.

Speaking to KickOff, Pienaar revealed that he and coach Gavin Hunt did not always see eye to eye.

“What I went through in the last five months tilted the bucket more towards me retiring,” he said.

“I joined them in Cape Town for pre-season, but when we came back in my second week, I had already approached the coach and told him that ‘coach I don’t think I can do this thing of waking up so early at seven in the morning to attend training. It is the first time in my career that I am waking up at 07:00 to go to training for a session that starts at 09:00.’

“He just said to me I will get used to it, but at my age, I couldn’t put up with sitting in the car for an hour or an hour-and-a-half just to get to training. Every morning, I was complaining, and I just thought: ‘This is not how I want to spend my last year playing football.’

“That was the point when I thought ‘I can’t be waking up at seven o’clock because I have never in my whole career woken up at seven o’clock.’ Sometimes I would wake up half past six just to go to training for a nine o’clock session.”

Pienaar’s spell at Wits lasted just under six months. He left the club during the mid-season break, just halfway through his contract.

Rumours surfaced that he had a falling out with Hunt during a changing room dressing-down delivered to the team after a loss with Pienaar hitting back at Hunt over his decision for the team to travel on a match-day.

Pienaar allegedly suggested to Hunt that he look towards himself and not just the players after a dismal start to the 2017⁄2018 season.