Pollard chooses Somerset over A tour
Kieron Pollard has turned down a place on the one-day leg of the West Indies A tour to England in favour of his deal with Somerset
Andrew McGlashan
06-Jun-2010
Kieron Pollard has put his domestic Twenty20 future ahead of his West
Indies career by turning down a place on the one-day leg of the
A-team tour to England in favour of his deal with Somerset for the
Friends Provident t20.
Pollard, the hard-hitting allrounder, is due to link up with the
county shortly but was offered a place on the West Indies A tour which
includes a triangular series with England Lions and India A in
June. However, Cricinfo understands he declined that opportunity
because he isn't on a WICB retainer contract and doesn't feel an
obligation to deny himself a lucrative spell with Somerset where the
money on offer is substantially more than what he would earn with the A
team.
"We are not impressed," a West Indies source told Cricinfo. "We had a
lot of talks with him to try and persuade him otherwise and spell out
his pathway for the future, but he wanted to play for Somerset
instead. We were trying to help his cricket develop by giving him
an A tour, but he didn't want to take up the offer."
Pollard is not among the 35 players contracted by the WICB and the
players association, WIPA, has defended his move saying it would be
unfair to deny him the chance to take up his county deal.
"He signed his contract with Somerset a long time before the squad was
announced and he isn't contracted with the West Indies board," Dinanth
Ramnarine, the WIPA president, told Cricinfo. "If he was he probably
wouldn't have had a choice, but it would almost be restraint of trade
to stop him going to Somerset."
Pollard was one of the big-money signings at last year's IPL auction, when he joined Mumbai Indians for more than $750,000, having impressed at the Champions League Twenty20 for Trinidad and Tobago, when he smashed 54 off 18 balls against New South Wales. But his international numbers are struggling to justify the hype with a Twenty20 international average of 12.66 and ODI figure of 19.92.
In the recent World Twenty20, Pollard averaged a paltry 9.40 before managing
to lift that to a more respectable 26.80 in the recent one-day series against South Africa.
The clash between West Indies A duty and his Somerset stint isn't the
first time Pollard's Twenty20 career has been at loggerheads with his
international duties. There was talk of him suing the WICB for loss of
earnings after he was called up to face Zimbabwe making him to miss Mumbai's opening IPL match in March.
However, Cricinfo understands that the legal threat has now been
dropped although the increasing tensions between player and board seem
unlikely to disappear any time soon.
Andrew McGlashan is assistant editor of Cricinfo