Mahendra Singh Dhoni misses out on BCCI contract; Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Jasprit Bumrah retain Grade A+

Details of the contract revealed by the BCCI show Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Jasprit Bumrah have been retained in the Grade A+ players category and will get Rs 7 crore for the October 2019 to September 2020 duration. Mayank Agarwal, Navdeep Saini, Shreyas Iyer, Washington Sunder and Deepak Chahar are the new entrants in the BCCI contract list.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the man who led India to World T20 and One Day International World Cup triumphs, failed to feature in the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) annual contract for 2019-20 announced on Thursday. Details of the contract revealed by the BCCI show Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Jasprit Bumrah have been retained in the Grade A+ players category and will get Rs 7 crore for the October 2019 to September 2020 duration. The trio was in Grade A+ in the 2018-19 contract too.

But Dhoni, who has not featured in the Indian team after the 2019 ODI World Cup semi-final loss to New Zealand, is not in the list of players although he was in Grade A and earned a salary of Rs 5 crore for the October 2018-September 2019 period. His last T20 International match for India was against Australia on February 27, 2019, at Bengaluru which the visitors had won by 7 wickets.

Mayank Agarwal, Navdeep Saini, Shreyas Iyer, Washington Sunder and Deepak Chahar are the new entrants in the BCCI contract list. While Mayank Agarwal is in Grade B and will earn Rs 3 crore, the other four players have got the Grade C contract and will be paid Rs 1 crore each.

Players who are part of Grade A are Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, KL Rahul, Shikhar Dhawan, Mohammed Shami, Ishant Sharma, Kuldeep Yadav and Rishabh Pant. They will be paid Rs 5 crore each. Rahul was in the Grade B category in the 2018-19 BCCI contract.

Apart from Mayank, Grade B list has Wriddhiman Saha, Umesh Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal and Hardik Pandya while Grade C has Kedar Jadhav, Manish Pandey, Hanuma Vihari, Shardul Thakur apart from Saini, Iyer, Sunder and Chahar. The pay grade of Grade C is Rs 1 crore.

Saha has been elevated to Grade B from Grade C while Ambati Rayudu, Dinesh Karthik and Khaleel Ahmed have failed to get the contract. The last three were in Grade C in the 2018-19 list.