Former England cricket captain Andrew Flintoff has revealed that he felt a lack of drive in his bid to excel in the Indian Preimer League (IPL) due the absence of “emotional attachment”.
The burly all-rounder was picked for a whopping $1.5 million by Chennai Super Kings (CSK) for the 2009 edition when the Englishman played only three matches before returning home with an injury.
He said that even though he earned a lot of money, he was not able to relate to the IPL because of the lack of any adrenaline rush.
“When I played in the Indian Premier League, when I played that stupid Allen Stanford game in 2008 (West Indies beat England to take the 12.4 million pounds prize), I realised something central about my relationship with cricket, about getting the best out of myself. I don’t play for money. I’m not sure I even can play just for money. Money is great, I can’t lie about that,” Flintoff wrote in a column for the Daily Mail on Sunday.
“But when I played for Chennai in the IPL in 2009, I couldn’t name everyone in my own team and coaching staff. I remember standing in the middle of the field, in a yellow kit, and my body was sore and hurting, as usual, but I just couldn’t put everything on the line for Chennai. It’s not a reflection on them. It’s simply that the team didn’t mean so much to me,” the 37-year-old added.
“The IPL? Nah. I’d always reckoned I could turn on adrenaline. But I can see now that I couldn’t. There had to be an emotional attachment to what I was doing. And it had to matter, which is why the one constant was always my county, Lancashire.”
Flintoff, who played 79 Tests and 141 One-day Internationals (ODIs), said he has always thrived for the teams which his heart has asked him to.
