Former Australia captain Michael Clarke stirred a hornet’s nest by claiming that Australian cricketers didn’t sledge Indian captain Virat Kohli hard enough in order to protect their IPL contracts.
Clarke mentioned that the Kangaroos sucked up to Kohli in order to land fat IPL deals.
"Everybody knows how powerful India is in regards to the financial part of the game, internationally or domestically with the IPL. I feel that Australian cricket, and probably every other team over a little period, went the opposite and actually sucked up to India. They were too scared to sledge Kohli or the other Indian players because they had to play with them in April," Clarke had said.
Indian team registered their maiden Test series win in Australia on their 2018-19 tour under Kohli’s captaincy and will again tour down under from October 2020 to January 2021 to play four Tests, three One Day Internationals and three Twenty20 International matches.
Meanwhile, Australia’s Test captain Tim Paine rubbished Clarke’s claims and said,“Who knows what will happen this series and, as we saw in the documentary, there was still quite a lot of heat in some of those games. I certainly wasn’t holding back, but again the IPL’s not a huge draw for me at the moment, so I had nothing to lose.”
“But anytime our guys go out and play a Test match for Australia, they’ll be giving their absolute all and I’m pretty sure they’re not thinking about an IPL contract when they’re running in, bowling to Virat,” he added.
This is not the first time Clarke slammed Australian cricketers of going easy. In the wake of the ball-tampering scandal in November of 2018, the 2015 World Cup-winning captain had said the national team “won’t win a game” by “worrying about being liked”.
“What you say on the field is irrelevant 99% of the time. Sometimes you can get a little inside someone’s head or something like that, but if you’re not batting well and not bowling well, all the talk in the world doesn’t mean anything,” Paine said.
“We’ve seen the last 12 or 18 months, we still do that, we still stick up for each other, we still fight as hard as any Australian team, but we’ve probably just had to move with the times and I’ve been really proud of the way we’ve played out cricket,” Paine signed off.
(PTI inputs)
