Revealed: Chris Gayle had ignored ICL to play in IPL
Jun 15, 2016 at 12:58 PM
West Indies star batsman Chris Gayle has revealed that he chose to ignore a massive offer from now defunct Indian Cricket League (ICL) for Indian Premier League (IPL) in his autobiography Six Machine.
The big Jamaican is known for his hard hitting and is definitely the greatest T20 player till date as he has the ability to score at an unbelievable pace. The player has been a cornerstone of the success of IPL as he had made a huge contribution to the tournament with his devastating batting.
The highest six hitters of IPL, Gayle has written, “The day came when a contract was put in front of me with the numbers US$ 3,000,000. The day came when even Stanford could seem small change.”
“$3m to play in the Indian Cricket League. Ramnaresh Sarwan had one for $2m. We looked at them together ‘Hmm. What we gonna do, Sars?’,” he continued as he couldn’t decide to take the offer or refuse it and asked others to it.
“I couldn’t sleep. Lying there staring at the ceiling. all the time thinking, this cannot be real, this is too good to be true,” he wrote as he was unclear to make up his mind.
Gayle has also explained why he rejected ICL as he came to know that IPL would be better and he would still have a chance to play for West Indies.
“I can’t tell you what to do, but just know the IPL will be the bigger and better thing. And if you go and play, you won’t play for the West Indies again, because the ICL will not be sanctioned by the boards.”
“I still wanted to play for the West Indies, so I turned it down,” he explains. “Too good to be true, and in the end it was. A lot of people didn’t get their money and didn’t get to play for their team.”
Gayle has also admitted that he never had an agent which helped him to lose some money but he could make his own decisions over his career.
“That’s why I never sign any agreement with any agent. I’m more like a freelancer. You come to me with something on the table, then we work it out from there. That’s how I do my stuff.
“I’m not signing anything with any particular body. Then, once a thing is whole, I have a lawyer, and sometimes even lawyers are the rip-off, and sometimes you have to pay the hard price.”