Most decorated former skipper and wicketkeeper nears end of the road.
In a move which reflects the thinking of Indian cricket board, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has dropped former skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni from their central contracts list for 2019-20 announced on Thursday.
The speculation over the future of Dhoni had been one of the most intriguing topics in Indian cricket ever since the most successful skipper of the country decided to take a sabbatical from the game since the ICC World Cup in July last year. He had initially spoken about taking a two-month break, during which Dhoni had served the Indian Army, and not played any competitive cricket since then.
Only on Tuesday, the legendary Sunil Gavaskar had questioned the inordinately long absence of Dhoni. “Fitness (of Dhoni) is something that I can’t tell you anything at all. The question that needs to be asked is of MSD himself. He has not made himself available to play for India since 10th of July (9th actually),” Gavaskar said, replying to a question if the player can still be considered for the World T20 later this year.
“That is the important question. Does anybody keep himself away from playing for India for that long? That is the question and therein lies the answer,” he added.
Meanwhile, the trio of captain Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Jasprit Bumrah has been named in top tier of A+ with an annual retainership of Rs 70 million.
Following is the list of contracted players:
Grade A+ (Rs 70 miilon): Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah.
Grade A (Rs 50 miilion): Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, K L Rahul, Shikhar Dhawan, Mohammed Shami, Ishant Sharma, Kuldeep Yadav, Rishabh Pant.
Grade B (Rs 30 million): Wriddhiman Saha, Umesh Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, Hardik Pandya, Mayank Agarwal.
Grade C: (Rs 10 million): Kedar Jadhav, Navdeep Saini, Deepak Chahar, Manish Pandey, Hanuma Vihari, Shardul Thakur, Shreyas Iyer, Washington Sundar.
