Indian Contracts finalized

The new contracts for the Indian cricket team was finalized recently. 4 grades are given usually which mean players get different payments based on where they have been categorized (60, 40, 25 and 15 lakhs for grades A, B, C, D respectively).

Batsmen

Grade A	Grade B	Grade C	Grade D
Sachin Tendulkar, Gautam Gambhir, Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, Yuvraj Singh	Suresh Raina, Rohit Sharma	S Badrinath, Wasim Jaffer	Robin Uthappa, Ajinkya Rahane, Manoj Tiwary, Cheteshwar Pujara, Mohammad Kaif, Virat Kohli, M Vijay, Shikhar Dhawan

Bowlers

Grade A	Grade B	Grade C	Grade D
Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh	Munaf Patel, RP Singh, Ishant Sharma, Praveen Kumar, Ashish Nehra	Pragyan Ojha, Sreesanth, Amit Mishra	Ashok Dinda, R Ashwin, Sudeep Tyagi, Dhawal Kulkarni

Wicket-keepers

Grade A	Grade B	Grade C	Grade D
MS Dhoni	-	Dinesh Karthik	Parthiv Patel, Wriddhiman Saha

All-rounders

Grade A	Grade B	Grade C	Grade D
-	-	Irfan Pathan,Yusuf Pathan	Piyush Chawla, Ravindra Jadeja, Abhishek Nayar

The list of players selected in the various types shows an imbalance which is very evident.

• The bowlers are very sparse - in fact, Grade D contains players who havent played international cricket at all (ones shaded yellow) - when are these players going to get a chance?
• The all-rounders are very difficult to produce!!! Unless you consider Harbhajan and Zaheer as all-rounders.
• What are the players like Kaif, Jaffer doing in this list? Do the selectors think they have a chance to play for Indai again? If no, why are they here?
• The test batsmen seem to be only in Grade A. Where are the potential ones (Badrinath and Vijay are the likely choices as of now) in the lower grades? When are they going to get a chance?

BCCI - can you explain this in our language please? Did you have a chat with our selectors also?