Gale's "Ambition to win trophies for Yorkshire"

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Six Yorkshire players were in the hat at the recent Indian Premier League auction and subsequently Andrew Gale has received criticism for putting money and the IPL ahead of his duties as Yorkshire skipper. As it turned out none of Gale, Bresnan, Sidebottom, Lyth, Shahzad or McGrath were snapped up by the Indian franchises, but as Andrew Gale has told Yorkshire Radio, he had no intention of going to play in the IPL anyway...

"My agent rang me when I was in Australia and he asked me if I’d be interested in going out to the IPL. Originally I said yes, but then I looked at the fixtures and realised that I’d probably miss six Championship games. I sat down with Martyn (Moxon) and my agent and said that my ambition was to win trophies with Yorkshire and not to go to the IPL. The IPL will come later in life."

I sat down with my agent and said, ‘I want to pull out of the IPL auction -I don’t want to go’. He said he thought it would be good PR to leave my name in and have it bandied around, have people look into me and if I did get picked up in the auction I would be pulled out.

The pleasing thing is that none of the Yorkshire players have been picked up and from a captain’s point-of-view I’ve got a full squad of players available for the first game of the season and it’s vital that we get off to a good start if we’re going to win trophies this year with Yorkshire.

I think the scheduling of the IPL needs to be looked at. The IPL and ECB need to sit down and negotiate when it’s best for English players as well as other players around the world. Players have only got a short time span in their careers and they want to earn as much money as they can and want to play on the biggest stage and the IPL provides that. Some players are reluctant to go in because they don’t k now how the ECB and the counties are going to react.

England are World Twenty20 Champions and you look at some of the players that haven’t been picked – Graeme Swann, Jimmy Anderson, Tim Bresnan – they are all great players who did well in the World Cup. Then you look at some of the players in Australia that have gone for big money it seems disappointing that the English lads haven’t been picked up.

On the positive side we are going to have players around for county cricket and it’s only going to make the English game stronger and I think that’s why England are doing so well in Test cricket at the moment because of the strength of county cricket."

You can hear Part One of Andrew’s interview with Yorkshire Radio on White Rose TV Wednesday and Part Two follows Thursday. As well as chatting about the IPL Andrew looks back at his trip to Australia, how well the Yorkies are doing for England and looks forward to his Lions trip to the Caribbean and Yorkshire's 2011 season.

Thanks to Ben Fry at Yorkshire Radio, an Official Media Partner of YCCC, for letting us reproduce the interview on our Club website.