Sydney, Feb 26 (ANI): Former Test star Damien Martyn’s charge that the Australian Cricketers Association was applying double standards in assessing the security threat for the IPL have been dismissed by the ACA chief.

Paul Marsh, chief executive of the ACA, said Martyn was wrong in his assertion that because the IPL rewarded individuals and not national bodies, more pressure was being applied on them to skip the lucrative six-week tournament.

Martyn wrote on his Twitter account that Cricket Australia-contracted players were more likely to favour skipping the tournament than retired freelancers such as himself.

The former Test batsman also claimed Cricket Australia had made plans to evacuate the Australian team from the Ashes tour in 2005 after the terrorist attack in London, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

“In a secret meeting CA said if one more bomb goes off we would go home and not complete Ashes, as history shows another bomb went off and CA said we couldn’t leave. Why?

“The reason was the Ashes was to [sic] big and too much money, any other country we would of [sic] left,” he wrote.

Marsh said the fact Australia had skipped international tours previously showed there was no bias towards the IPL.

“The two are simply not related. We have got an independent security adviser, Reg Dickason, who we have used for 12 years and we have asked him to give us an assessment of the security situation in India and provide us with a recommendation,” Marsh said.

‘We have done that for tours for the Australian team and for the IPL. We have shown emphatically that when the advice has been not to tour, we don’t. That has been clear when we didn’t travel to Pakistan or Sri Lanka.

“The players want to go to India and we want them to go. We have asked an expert to give them advice and then it is up to the player to make the call,” Marsh added. (ANI)