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  • "I have never seen an Australian team play such defensive cricket - which is a good thing for us."
    Fresh from his Man-of-the-Match performance in the Bangalore Test, Zaheer Khan fires a salvo against Australia

    Oct 13, 2008

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    Articles tagged as: bonuses

    Performance-based bribes for England

    By Will 4 months ago, Comments

    England’s players netted a bonus of £180,000 for their series-win over New Zealand a few days ago. It’s a fair chunk of money, on top of their already comfortable salaries and extra advertising deals with the likes of Adidas. The Indian Premier League, however, has blown salaries and players’ monetary expectations out of the water, which has prompted the ECB to raise the series bonuses to £2m. It is effectively a performance-based bribe: do well for us in Tests, the ECB say, and you’ll be handsomely rewarded. Don’t worry about that silly Indian thing: beat the South Africans and we’ll buy you all iPhones and cars.

    It’s a fair old whack, and a reasonable gesture by the ECB, but the newly sized pot surely can’t dissuade players from considering the IPL, can it? Over in India players are promised hundreds of thousands, even if they fail abysmally. Money talks, as that awesome AC/DC song says, but can Test cricket genuinely hope to match the new money offered by Indian leagues (and the new Champions League)?

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