SYDNEY: Australian cricket captain Tim Paine on Thursday rubbished ex-skipper Michael Clarke’s claims that his team had “sucked up” to Kohli in order to land fat deals with IPL franchises, calling it a tactical decision not to engage Kohli into verbal duel during the 2018-19 series but there was no other motivation.

“I certainly didn’t notice too many people being that nice to Virat or not trying to get him out or anything like that,” Paine told ESPNcricinfo.

“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.

“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.”

In November, 2018, Clarke had slammed attempts to improve Australian cricket’s image in the wake of a infamous 2018 ball-tampering scandal, saying the national team “won’t win a game” by “worrying about being liked”.

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% of the time,” Paine said.

“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,” he said.

“There’s no doubt our first focus is on executing our skill and being as good as we can possibly be in that area and then sometimes things happen on a cricket field and you’ve got to go in, you’ve got to change your tack, or you’ve got to have a few words.

“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.”

Published in Dawn, April 10th, 2020