Austrial's test skipper Paine rejected Clarke's claims that his team had 'sucked up' to Kohli in order to land fat deals with IPL franchises, calling it a a tactical decision not to engage Kohli into verbal fight.
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| Tim Paine with Virat Kohli |
Australian cricket team didn't want to unnecessarily provoke Virat Kohli but his predecessor Michael Clarke's claims of players being scared to sledge the Indian captain in order to protect their IPL deals is far from truth, said current Test skipper Tim Paine.
"I thought everyone who had the ball in their hand or when we were batting were trying their absolute best to win the game for Australia. I'm not sure who was going easy on him; we certainly had a thing where we didn't want to provoke any fight with him because we think that's when he plays at his best," Paine said.
India are scheduled to tour Australia from October, 2020 to January, 2021 to play four Tests, three One Day Internationals and three Twenty20 International matches. "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," Paine said.
Paine said verbal wars won't win matches unless one puts up the effort on the field
"What you say on the field is irrelevant 99 per cent 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.
"As 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 added
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