Source: Daily_Mail
Shane Warne heads for a right royal £3m playing in India - CHARLES SALE
The Australian campaign to bring 41-year-old Shane Warne back to Test cricket will be understood in India, where he is due to earn an astonishing £3million playing Twenty20. [LNB]Rajasthan Royals' first move on being reinstated to the Indian Premier League is to retain the services of their player-captain-coach Warne on a contract worth £1.14m a year. [LNB]The two-year deal with an option of a third season, when he will be 43, will make Warne one of the highest paid players in the event, despite having retired from Test cricket in 2007 and hardly looking like a toned athlete - with his prominent double chin - when he arrived in London this week to work on his chat show. [LNB] In the money: Warne is set to profit a windfall for his IPL return to Rajasthan Royals[LNB]But Rajasthan, who value Warne's high profile off the field as much as his leadership on it, believe the spinner can cope with six weeks of 20-over cricket, even at his venerable age. [LNB]Royals are also paying Australia's ordinary all-rounder Shane Watson £750,000 per tournament for three years. And this suggests England's most wanted players, Kevin Pietersen, Jimmy Anderson, Stuart Broad and Graeme Swann, will attract offers at least as big next month. [LNB] Formula One team McLaren's cutting-edge technology let them down when an email asking recipients to confirm inclusion in next year's mailing list gave them all everyone's else's contact details. [LNB]Not impressed was BBC's F1 pundit Martin Brundle, who replied to all: 'What a ridiculous f*** up. Brilliant. Hello everybody. My BlackBerry battery is not prepared for this. Happy Christmas.' [LNB]McLaren apologised and blamed a clerical error. [LNB] The slip-on brogues worn by David Pleat (right) when he famously ran on to the pitch after his Luton side won at Manchester City in 1983 to survive in the top flight, have been bought for £4,000. [LNB]The shoes, which have been in the loft in the Pleat household ever since, were auctioned in aid of Luton's youth development at a function celebrating the 125th anniversary of the club, who enjoyed their best days under Pleat. [LNB] The latest London 2012 initiative, Winning Words, is to put inspiring poetry nominated by the public on locations in the Olympic Park. [LNB]For once that literary giant Jeffrey Archer has come up with a decent suggestion, taken from American poet Henry Longfellow's The Ladder of Saint Augustine: The heights by great men reach ed and kept/ Were not attained by sudden flight,/ But they, while their companions slept,/ Were toiling upward in the night. [LNB] It's all Greek to Evans Ipswich's secretive owner Marcus Evans is still in overdrive, selling unofficial London 2012 corporate hospitality that exploit a legal grey area by making no mention of how he will acquire tickets. [LNB]Yet it has emerged he might be appointed authorised ticket agent for Greece as well as Ireland, which still has to be ratified by the Olympic organisers. [LNB]Evans, whose picture was first published in Sports Agenda, left his box at Portman Road last Saturday when he discovered Sky Sports cameras were trained on it during his club's 3-1 defeat by Swansea. And he left in his helicopter before the end. [LNB] The mass outcry for more transparency, which followed FIFA's World Cup vote fiasco, should start at home. [LNB]Especially after the unacceptable silence from the Premier League on the supposed fine handed out to Manchester United for manager Sir Alex Ferguson's continuous breach of media regulations by not talking to the BBC. [LNB]It is now more than seven weeks since the PL board, led by Sir Dave Richards, made their decision and there is still no announcement. [LNB] Robbie Savage does not exactly shy away from self-publicity, so there will be no stopping him when he co-hosts Saturday's 606 football phone in on 5 Live after winning the sports category in the Plain English Campaign Media Awards - 'straight to the point and no messing'. [LNB]Colin Murray and Alan Green, eat your hearts out.[LNB] [LNB] Explore more:People: Martin Brundle, Alex Ferguson, Graeme Swann, Jeffrey Archer, Robbie Savage, Stuart Broad, Jimmy Anderson, Kevin Pietersen, David Pleat, Shane Warne Places: London, Australia, Greece, Ireland, United Kingdom, India
