₹40 lakh season earnings in the offing for best domestic talent

But only the experienced players and those whose teams make the knockout rounds will truly benefit as domestic pay hike takes full effect in the upcoming season.

Madhya Pradesh's 30-year-old Gaurav Yadav was all guts as he fought on despite a head injury, just to see his team past the finish line in this year’s Ranji trophy final. The medium pacer, however, is unlikely to be rewarded with an IPL contract – his nagging line and length with the red ball is not best suited for T20 cricket.

BCCI logo (HT Photo)

But he may still end up with a pay purse higher than what he would have pocketed had he won the lowest IPL contract worth ₹20 lakhs. Those will be his rewards from playing a full season of Indian domestic cricket. Whether the revised match fees for five months of domestic toil being compared to a base level IPL contract is fair is open to debate. But it is a correction, nonetheless. First-class cricketers were unhappy that even those benched in IPL would make the same money as the best on the domestic circuit.

The pay hike that the Board of Control for Cricket in India had announced last year did not benefit the players entirely, in what was a Covid-affected truncated domestic season. Teams who got knocked out after the round-robin stage could play as few as 3 Ranji trophy matches and 10 white-ball domestic matches. But a complete return to action announced by the board which includes the Duleep Trophy and Irani Cup, will offer extra incentive to cricketers like Yadav.

Even as half the cricket world is ill at ease about T20 overkill and mushrooming franchise leagues, in Indian domestic cricket, it still pays to be a first-class cricketer. With the match fee rise contingent on the number of days of cricket a player competes in, red-ball players stand to benefit.

Yadav should make it to the Central Zone team for the Duleep trophy – he took the most Ranji wickets among pacers in 2022. He will next play against the Rest of India in the Irani Cup. That’s 9 days of work which should fetch him ₹5.4 lakhs. Should his team make it to the Duleep finals it would mean 8 additional playing days, which would make him richer by another ₹4.8 lakhs.

Yadav’s match fees from each Ranji trophy game will now go up from ₹1.4 lakhs to ₹2.4 lakhs ( ₹35,000 per day to ₹60,000 per day). His pay from Mushtaq Ali T20s has also nearly doubled ( ₹17,500 to ₹30,000 per match). Assuming that he plays in all the league matches of the Mushtaq Ali T20s (7), Vijay Hazare ODIs (7) and Ranji trophy (7), Yadav stands to make ₹28.5 lakhs for the season comprising of 51 playing days. However, if Chandrakant Pandit can take MP to another Ranji final, that would mean three more knock-out matches. In a best-case scenario, Yadav’s season returns could even go up to ₹42.3 lakhs.

That’s the catch in the graded pay hike introduced by the BCCI. The fewer matches you play in a season, the lesser you are paid. And, inexperienced cricketers (less than 20 career matches) don’t get compensated the same way yet. A plate division newcomer who only plays the league matches of Ranji, Mushtaq Ali and Vijay Hazare trophy will end up with ₹15.4 lakhs for the season (42 days x ₹40,000 per day). A mid-level cricketer (20-40 domestic matches) would fall under ₹50,000 per day match fees slab and end up earning in the range of ₹20-25 lakhs.

“Only those who have played above 40 domestic matches will truly benefit,” said a senior domestic player. “But the good thing is the criteria is not haphazard. 40 domestic-match experience is something you can acquire by being a playing XI regular in one season itself. And they are counting all the three formats while arriving at this number, which gives you a sizable bunch of such domestic talent.”