New Delhi: The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) have announced a new contract system and compensation structure for the senior men and women’s teams that will see a hike in their payments from previous years.
An elite Grade A+, comprising five cricketers including captain Virat Kohli, has been introduced which will see the cricketers earning Rs70 million per year. The other members of the elite five are Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Jasprit Bumrah.
Interestingly, leading pacer Mohammad Shami, who is in the eye of a storm following his wife’s accusations of adultery on the social media, has been ignored completely from the list and he doesn’t feature in any of the four groups formed by the BCCI for the calendar year for the period of October 2017 to September 2018.
“The Hon’ble Supreme Court of India appointed Committee of Administrators (CoA) for BCCI on Wednesday announced the Annual Player Contracts for the period from October 2017 to September 2018. The CoA was of the view that the performance and position of Indian cricket needs to be recognised with the fee structure comparable to the best in the world,” the BCCI said in a statement.
The following is the new grade of payments as per the new contracts: Grade A: Rs50 million, Grade B: Rs30 million and Grade C: Rs10 million. Meanwhile, former India skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni remains in Grade A and will receive Rs50 million per annum. Dhoni hasn’t been playing Test cricket for a long time now and that is being seen by many as the reason why he wasn’t promoted to Grade A+.
Dhoni is one of the seven players to be named in Grade A and the others are Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Murali Vijay, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane and Wridhhiman Saha. Grade B players will be richer by Rs30 million per annum and the seven cricketers are K.L. Rahul, Umesh Yadav, Kuldeep Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Hardik Pandya, Ishant Sharma and Dinesh Karthik.
Kedar Jadhav, Manish Pandey, Axar Patel, Karun Nair, Suresh Raina, Parthiv Patel and Jayant Yadav will receive Rs10 million each for being named in Group C. As for the women’s team, the Indian board have announced a new Grade C, which will see players earning Rs1 million per annum in addition to Grade A: Rs5 million and Grade B: Rs3 million. The quartet of women’s cricketers in Group A are Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami, Harmanpreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana.
