New Delhi: The Board of Control for Cricket in India has announced its annual central contract amid the ICC T20 World Cup. A total of 30 players have been included in the new contract. This time only three grades A, B and C have been kept in the contract. Last time there were a total of four grades. A+ grade has been removed in the new contract, in which players like Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma were there. Players included in A+ grade used to get a salary of Rs 7 crore annually. Apart from this, 21 women cricketers have been given annual contracts of A, B and C categories.
ODI and Test captain Shubman Gill, fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah and Test all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja have been kept in A grade. However, BCCI has not announced the retainership fees of all three grades. Earlier, Rs 5 crore was given in A category, Rs 3 crore in B and Rs 1 crore in C. Kohli and Rohit play the same format after retiring from Test and T20 and hence they were not kept in Grade A.
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A+ grade was started on Dhoni’s suggestion
It is believed that the Committee of Administrators had introduced A+ grade on the suggestion of former captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni. This was for the cricketers who performed well in all three formats and over the years only Kohli, Rohit, Jadeja and Bumrah have been in this category. Now three of them have retired from one or two formats, hence the board does not want to keep only Bumrah in the A+ category. Gill is not certain to play in all formats and has not got a place in the T20 World Cup team.
Players who got central contract-
Grade A: Shubman Gill, Jasprit Bumrah, Ravindra Jadeja
Grade B: Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Washington Sundar, KL Rahul, Mohammed Siraj, Hardik Pandya, Rishabh Pant, Kuldeep Yadav, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Suryakumar Yadav, Shreyas Iyer.
Grade C: Axar Patel, Tilak Verma, Rinku Singh, Shivam Dubey, Sanju Samson, Arshdeep Singh, Prasidh Krishna, Akash Deep, Dhruv Jurel, Harshit Rana, Varun Chakraborty, Nitish Reddy, Abhishek Sharma, Sai Sudarshan, Ravi Bishnoi, Ruturaj Gaikwad.