Nick Kyrgios expressed regret for sharing social media posts by self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate after making his debut as a BBC co-commentator at Wimbledon.

The Australian said he has to be “smarter” and “better” as he had “no idea” about Tate’s pending court case at the time of the “naive retweet”.

In a Piers Morgan interview, Kyrgios said: “I feel like I’m a very good person.”

“I definitely think I am misunderstood a little bit,” said Kyrgios. “I think people on the street, when they look at me, they think I’m going to be doing something crazy, and ‘Is this guy going to lose his marbles at any time?’ But it’s just something that I’ve been branded with, and I think I’ve kind of run with it a little bit. But closest family and friends know that I’m actually quite calm.”

Kyrgios, who shared a post from Tate in February on X this year, suggested he was unaware Tate and his brother Tristan faced a trial in Romania after being arrested in December 2023 over allegations of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang – charges they deny.

“At the time I had no idea, with anything that was going on in his life, or anything that he was allegedly doing,” said Kyrgios of Tate. “I was just on my phone, saw the tweet, and it made me think. The relationship I’ve had with tennis, or things that I do, I think I am obsessed with tennis because I’m still here at 30 playing and I’m still training. That particular thing, for me, was just a naive retweet and everything that’s come from it is, for me, I wish, obviously, I wouldn’t have done it, if I knew that all of these things would have happened.”

He added: “I have to be a bit smarter than that, because not everything that he does as well is, like - it’s not good. So I have to be better than that, because I have a lot of people to look up to me… I just have to be better.”

The Telegraph, London