STRIKING the balance between things such as the Indian Premier League and county cricket is a very tricky situation for England players like Liam Plunkett and David Willey.

Personally, I don’t think the players should be blamed when they chose the former, as has happened with these two Yorkshire lads.

I’m very close to Dave – he’s a very good friend of mine – and to see how much hard work he puts in at Yorkshire, he does it to play for England and be knocking the door down of competitions such as the IPL.

As a sportsman, you are always trying to get to the peak of where you can be – that’s international cricket.

For me, at the moment, my focus is getting into the first team at Yorkshire and being consistent. But theirs is to play for England, and I don’t think anyone should question that.

There’s no more coverage in world cricket than at the IPL, it’s even more watched than international cricket I would imagine.

For any cricketer, it’s an aspiration to play in the IPL, and the way England are going in limited overs cricket now, they want them playing in that because they want them under pressure. The more games in which that happens, it’s better for England.

With them looking towards the 2019 World Cup and winning it at home, opportunities such as this are positives for player and country.

I have seen quite a lot of stuff on Twitter about Dave, we all read it as players, and it’s not nice to see. You know, things like ‘He’s only doing it for the money’ or ‘He doesn’t want to play red ball’.

I know Dave really well, and I can tell you it’s not about the money. It’s an added bonus, of course, but he wants to be in a team who wins the World Cup for England for the first time. And this is going to help him to do that.

I’m absolutely sure it’s the same situation with Liam.

He wants to play red ball, he wants to play for Yorkshire and give 100 percent. Just because he got the call, it doesn’t mean any of the above is untrue. It’s just that his main focus at the minute is playing for England, and that outweighs Yorkshire unfortunately.

Both Liam and Dave are down to earth characters and know how hard we’ve been working at Yorkshire to put right what happened last season, and they’ve been a part of that. They may not have been around much, but they’ve bought into the meetings we’ve had. They want that as much as anyone.

But, as I said earlier, you wouldn’t be a sportsman if you weren’t trying to get better and better each day to play the highest level you could.

Their circumstances have changed, but if they didn’t have the IPL they are fully committed to Yorkshire and red ball cricket.

I spoke to Dave in between him getting the deal and leaving for Chennai, and I can tell you it wasn’t an easy decision for him. He obviously wanted to go, but he loves playing for Yorkshire. Liam will be the same.

It’s just so hard at the moment, a really difficult time for directors of cricket, coaches and the game in general because this has never really happened before, including things like Rash and Alex Hales, which is different again.

They don’t know what to put in contracts, they don’t know whether to say to players ‘You can or you can’t go’, the ECB don’t know what to say because it’s helping them that players are going to the IPL.

Until things go wrong, you don’t know how to go about it.

It will take a bit of time to get the perfect structure in terms of contracts, but I’m sure we will get there.