The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has made a plan to give more salary to the players playing Test cricket. The board has implemented an incentive scheme for test players. Now players who play 75 percent test matches in a season will get around Rs 45 lakh per match. Whereas players who play 50 to 74 percent of test matches in a season will get Rs 30 lakh per match. Secretary Jai Shah announced this after Team India’s victory in the Dharamshala Test.
A Test player who plays around 10 Test matches in a season will get a hefty incentive of Rs 4.50 crore, over and above his potential match fee of Rs 1.5 crore (Rs 15 lakh per match). Apart from this, top cricketers will also get ‘retainer fee’ under the annual central contract.
If experienced cricketers Cheteshwar Pujara and Umesh Yadav have not got contracts this year, they will be given their ‘incentive’ amount for the last season. Jai Shah said that the board will spend an amount of around Rs 45 crore for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 sessions.
BCCI Secretary Jay Shah, while talking to a group of journalists, said, “With this scheme, players will earn more than the Indian Premier League (IPL) contracts. This shows that IPL is important, but bilateral cricket is also very important. The total amount spent on this will be Rs 45 crore.”
Shah wrote on The ‘Test Cricket Incentive Scheme’ from the 2022-23 season will act as an additional reward to the existing match fee of Rs 15 lakh for Test matches. This incentive will be retrospective with effect from 2022-23 season onwards. It will also be on the players who take it.”
For example, if Indian captain Rohit Sharma has played all 10 Tests (World Test Championship final, two each against West Indies and South Africa, five against England) during the 2023-24 season, he will have to give priority to Test cricket. You will get a match fee of Rs 1.5 crore. Besides this he will also get Rs 4.5 crore. In such a situation, he will earn Rs 6 crore from Test cricket alone.
If his annual retainership of Rs 7 crore is also added to this, then his earning will be Rs 13 crore. This will certainly be different from the amount he gets for ODI (Rs 8 lakh per match) and T20 International (Rs 4 lakh per match) matches in a season.
This decision has been taken due to some players not giving priority to Test cricket. In fact, recently young players like Ishan Kishan, Shreyas Iyer and Deepak Chahar left Ranji Trophy and were busy preparing for IPL. In such a situation, with this decision the board has tried to draw the attention of the players towards Test cricket.