Shreyas and Kishan back in the BCCI contract; Pant gets an upgrade
Shreyas Iyer and Ishan Kishan are back on the BCCI’s central contracts list for 2024-25 after being left out the previous time. The top tier of the contracts (A+) has four players –Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, Jasprit Bumrah and Rabindra Jadeja. However Rohit, Kohli and Jadeja have retired from T-20Is after India won the T-20 World Cup in June last year. Rishav Pant has been promoted from Grade B to Grade A, which also has Mohammad Siraj, KL Rahul, Shubman Gill, Hardik Pandya, and Mohammad Shami. Pant had previously been in Grade A – for the 2022-23 season but was moved down to Grade-B after not playing for over a year following a horrific car crash in December 2022. He returned to play IPL 2024 and has since been part of all formats for India – he’s played 10 Tests, one ODI, and 10 T20Is since then – and has returned to Grade A. Iyer, meanwhile, is part of Grade B along with Kuldeep Yadav, Axar Patel, Yashasvi Jaiswal and India T-20I captain Suryakumar Yadav, while Kishan has been added to Grade C. The new entrants in the contracts’ list – all currently in Grade C – are Nitish Reddy, Dhruv Jurel, Abhishek Sharma, Sarfaraz Khan, Akash Deep, Varun Chakrabarthy, and Harshit Rana. Shardul Thakur, KS Bharat, Avesh Khan, and Jitesh Sharma, who were all on the Grade C list – the lowest of the retainers – last year, have been dropped. The BCCI did not mention the amounts for the four contract categories, but the players in the A+ category are paid Rs 7 crore, the players contracted in A grade are given Rs 5 crore, the B-graded cricketers are allotted Rs 3 crore, and the cricketers listed in C-grade are paid Rs 1 crore.
