Indian captain Virat Kohli, hitman Rohit Sharma and star pacer Jasprit Bumrah have been put in the top bracket by the BCCI in the annual player retainership for 2018-19. The trio is in Group A+and will be paid £700,000 for the period of October 2018 to September 2019. The major gainer in the annual contract is the young wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant. The 21-year-old Pant, who was not in last year's list, made an entry directly into Group A. He is there along with Dhoni and nine other players and will get an annual payment of £500,000.
But the big losers have been Shikhar Dhawan and Bhuvneshwar Kumar, both of whom were unable to perform up to their potential and slipped from the Group A+ to Group A. The men's list has 25 players compared to 26 in the last year's contract. The other two groups are Group B and Group C with their annual payment being £300,000 and £100,000 respectively. There are two new entrants in the list - left-arm fast bowler Khaleel Ahmed and batsman Hanuma Vihari. Both have been kept in Group C along with five other players. The criteria for getting the central contract is that a player should have played either three Test match or eight One Day International matches.
In the women's category, there are three groups - A, B and C. While players in Group A will be paid an annual retainership of Rs 50,00,000, those on Group B and C will get Rs 30,00,000 and Rs 10,00,000 respectively.
The list:
Group A+: Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah.
Group A: Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, MS Dhoni, Shikhar Dhawan, Mohd. Shami, Ishant Sharma, Kuldeep Yadav and Rishabh Pant.
Group B: KL Rahul, Umesh Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal and Hardik Pandya.
Group C: Kedar Jadhav, Dinesh Karthik, Ambati Rayudu, Manish Pandey, Hanuma Vihari, Khaleel Ahmed and Wriddhiman Saha.
Women's list:
Group A: Mithali Raj, Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana and Poonam Yadav.
Group B: Ekta Bisht, Jhulan Goswami, Shikha Pandey, Deepti Sharma and Jemimah Rodrigues.
Group C: Radha Yadav, D Hemalatha, Anuja Patil, Veda Krishnamurthy, Mansi Joshi, Punam Raut, Mona Meshram, Arundhati Reddy, Rajeshwari Gayakwad, Taniya Bhatia and Pooja Vastrakar.
