BCCI offered to pay whatever we were losing: Bravo on India tour pullout

NEW DELHI: Former all-rounder Dwayne Bravo said the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) “offered to pay” his players who threatened to pull out of the 2014 ODI series in India after a contracts fallout with the West Indies Cricket Board.

He said that a message at 3 am from the then BCCI chief N Srinivasan prompted him to convince his team to play the first ODI after threatening to pull out. Then, in the middle of the fourth ODI, in the hill town of Dharamsala, the WICB informed the BCCI that it had decided to call off the remainder of tour after a “contracts fall” with players.

Big money was at stake but Bravo said the BCCI understood their problem.

“Yeah, they understood, of course. Because they were very supportive of all of us. Actually they even offered to pay us whatever we were losing. We were like, ‘we don’t want you to pay us. We need our board to sort out our contracts’,” Bravo told ‘i955fm’.

The 35-year-old all-rounder, who announced his retirement from international cricket in October, spoke about the sequence of events that transpired before the WICB decided to call off the tour. “I remember fully well before we said we weren’t going to play the first game, 3 am in the morning, I get a message from the BCCI boss, the old one, Mr (N) Srinivasan, that ‘please take the field’.

“I listened to him and woke up at 6 am to tell the team that we have to play. And everyone was against playing. Everyone thought that I panicked and chickened out,” Bravo said.

The decision was unanimous, according to Bravo. “Collectively as a team, we decided what to do. I listened to every single player.