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So, if they get offered six figure contracts, those brave souls who make up the English cicket team are prepared to risk their safety on the subcontinent to play cricket without a moments concern.

Hypocritical tossers.

Fk it, ok I'll go then............

why is it hypocritical? life is one long amalgamation of EV-based situations, like you might not take a detour that has a 0.0001% chance of leaving you killed if that detour saved you £1, but if it saved you £50 every time you made it, and you made it frequently, you might then deem it the right decision.

Obviously the marketing/media part of this might seem skewed, but who really knows how much of that represents the players thoughts vs how much it represents the journalist wanting to make a name for themselves.

I cant blame them at all for not wanting to play for england in matches over there vs wanting to play for big money (to them) over there. ITs not like the ECB give a crap about moral concerns, look at what they did in the Windies!

I don't blame them for going at all. Apart from the top few in England most don't earn massive salaries, let them earn as much as they can get in the 15 year window or so career they have. That money will have to support them for the rest of their lives, and apart from a few after speaker dinners they will get shortly after they retire many will just be forgotten about pretty quickly and be back to the grind of normal life.

Also professional cricketers have one of the highest suicide rates of any profession. GL to them I say........

Also any potential threat is way more likely to be against the 'England Cricket Team' than any particular individual playing for an IPL team I would have thought, from a points scoring point of view for terrorists.

wat

Absolutely true, not necessarily the big names but it really is........

I don't mind them going at all.

I just remember all the hand wringing and humming and hawwing before they went back to India a few weeks ago.

Mr Cricketer, please let me get this straight.,

You are worried about your safety when you are playing for your country, but not when you are playing in some tin pot tournament for oodles of cash.

Excuse me if I don't have any sympathy for you next time you have a so called dilemma.

Like I said

Also any potential threat is way more likely to be against the 'England Cricket Team' than any particular individual playing for an IPL team I would have thought, from a points scoring point of view for terrorists.

a) they are more liekyl to be attacked being a england cricketer vs being a representative of a team like the bengali beavers
b) the media circle in cricket is so enormous. My cousin played first-class cricket for Notts and was wicket-keeper for England for a couple of years on and off, and he would regale so many horror stories of what he was/wasn't allowed to say to the media. This was all before these central contracts, but even before then, it was a mssive issue. Most of the stuff they say, isn't what they really want to say, and they really are hounded to say whatever the board wants them to represent.

If they were being honest, they would say "yeah the money was shite with england, but the $1m a year I can get from india is worth it".. and if they said that, the england naysayers would insult them relentlessly for just caring about the money.

Well, I googled cricketers and suicide.. and I read a number of times in a number of articles they have a high suicide rate... and the only example I found was David Bairstow, which I knew about.

Statistical anomoly from a very small sample imo.

Chris Read?

no it was Wayne Noon.. he still works at Notts as a coach.

I would have thought security would be much tighter for an England Tour a few days after a major terrorist attack than for a Bengali Beavers v Mumbai Muffdivers clash.

I think honesty from sportsmen is a rare and prized commodity. We aren't stupid, just tell us what really matters and forget the bs.

I personally think there is a very small segment of society that really appreciates honestly and ignores the BS.  Imagine if for example kaka went to Man City and said to the papers "yeah I went there coz I get £500k a week and that extra £370k a week means so much to me that I can spend it on my family. I dont really give a shit whether or not Man City do any good, but that fat gold in my pocket is all that mattered"... the entire media/society would be a frenzy. I personally would much prefer them to say stuff like that, and I can tell you would as well, but I dont think that stuff like that would go down well in this country as a whole.

edit, and as for security, yup, maybe security would be tighter as a whole, but Id say that the desire of these murderous terrorists would be a lot higher if they can off an england player vs a player that represents a team in a league based in their own country. I dont think security matters that much, the animals will always win over the protectors because they want to hurt more than the protectors want to protect, and I'd venture to say that its a much bigger feather-in-the-cap for someone to off a player on england duty vs someone repping an indian cricket side.

I really, really hated it when Alex Ferguson called Man City's offer for Kaka "silly money".

And £30 million for Berbatov isn't silly money, you've drunken bigotted old fool?

you are right, but when your club can afford it, the transfer fee's etc dont matter at all. I'm with you, I would love, love, love it if these players said explicitly why they did what they did in terms of transfers. I'd love to be a fly on christiano Ronaldo's wall for example.

I thought England did go back out to India to play?
I thought they waited for a security review to confirm it was safe but it was still up to the individual if they wanted to pull out?
Having now been back and witnessed first hand that it is safe after nothing bad happened they are now willing to go back again? shock horror.

If it was for £1m for three weeks work I'd play cricket in Baghdad with 'Allah is a gaylord' written on my shirt.

LOL