The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) announced the new player contracts for India senior men players, with four classifications dividing the players. Notably, former India captain MS Dhoni was dropped from the BCCI's list of centrally contracted players, raising fresh doubts on the future of the veteran wicketkeeper-batsman, who has not played since the World Cup semi-final loss to New Zealand in 2019. Apart from Dhoni, Dinesh Karthik, Khaleel Ahmed and recently retired, Ambati Rayudu have been dropped from the central contract. The BCCI announced the central contracts for the period of October 2019 to September 2020. Dhoni was in the A category, which fetches a player £500,000, until last year.
The contracts, from October 2019 to September 2020, are in four categories - A+ (£700,000), A (£500,000), B (£300,000) and C (£100,000). As many as 27 players have been divided into these four categories, with skipper Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Jasprit Bumrah being the three in the A+ category.
According to a BCCI release, following are the players in the other categories:
Category A: Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, KL Rahul, Shikhar Dhawan, Mohammad Shami, Ishant Sharma, Kuldeep Yadav and Rishabh Pant.
Category B: Wriddhiman Saha, Umesh Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Hardik Pandya, Mayank Agarwal.
Category C: Kedar Jadhav, Navdeep Saini, Deepak Chahar, Manish Pandey, Hanuma Vihari, Shardul Thakur, Shreyas Iyer, Washington Sundar.
Harmanpreet, Smriti, Poonam bag top contract
For women cricketers, Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, and Poonam Yadav were awarded grade A contract while in grade B, a total of eight players have been named - Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami, Jemimah Rodrigues, Ekta Bisht, Radha Yadav, Shikha Pandey, Deepti Sharma, Taniya Bhatia.
Grade C players include Veda Krishnamurthy, Punam Raut, Anuja Patil, Mansi Joshi, D Hemlatha, Arundhati Reddy, Rajeshwari Gayakwad, Pooja Vastrakar, Harleen Deol, Priya Punia, and Shafali Verma.
Category A players will get Rs 50,00,000 while B and C category players will get Rs 30,00,000 and Rs 10,00,000 respectively.
