Huge pay hikes for cricketers, Dhoni, Ashwin not in elite list

NEW DELHI: The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) on Wednesday announced a new A+ category in its annual contracts, but kept Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Ravichandran Ashwin out of the elite list — an indication of the players the Indian board considers indispensable across formats.

The only five cricketers in the A+ grade were skipper Virat Kohli, top-order batsman Rohit Sharma, opener Shikhar Dhawan, and pacemen Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Jaspit Bumrah. They will all get a ₹7 crore annual retainer — a 350% hike from the ₹2 crore the players in the A category got until now.

In addition, players also get match fees for every Test (₹15 lakh), one-day international (₹6 lakh) and T20 international (₹3 lakh) they play in.

Grade A, which is now the second tier, includes seven players —Ashwin, Dhoni, Ajinkya Rahane, Murali Vijay, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ravindra Jadeja and Wriddhiman Saha — who will get ₹5 crore annually.

Mohammed Shami, who has been in the news because of a public dispute with his wife, has been excluded from the list. Officials in the board did not specify if his exclusion was connected to the issue.

The hikes will cost the Indian board ₹67 crore per year more than what it spent in retainer payments until now.

“There was a belief that state associations were cornering a major share of the revenues, so we thought that the top players, who are bigger stakeholders, should be getting more money,” said Vinod Rai, the head of the Committee of Administrators (CoA) that oversees the running of Indian cricket under the Lodha committee guidelines.