5 Players who got more than they deserved in BCCI annual contract list

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), on January 16, 2020, announced the list of its centrally contracted players of the Indian Men’s cricket team for the upcoming season October 2019-September 2020.

There were some new names in the list like Deepak Chahar, Navdeep Saini, and Washington Sundar included in the list, some of the names were also excluded, who failed to perform admirably in the previous calendar year. 27 players were divided into four categories, with Virat Kohli, Jasprit Bumrah and Rohit Sharma included in the topmost A+ Category which nets them a sum of INR 7 crore.

The biggest news coming out from the announcements made by the BCCI when they announced the annual contracts list for 2019-2020 was the exclusion of Mahendra Singh Dhoni. The wicketkeeper-batsman has made himself unavailable for most of the series India featured in post the World Cup.  Dropping him completely from the contracts list was a very harsh step that the selectors took.

The selectors clearly saw that and also keeping in mind the future assignments and what MS Dhoni could probably bring to the table now with him ageing and out of playing touch, they have decided to move on. But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the road, for MSD  a solid IPL 2020 for CSK could well see the revered MSD return to Indian colours for the World T20 in Australia.

MS Dhoni had retired from Test cricket in December 2014 after playing 90 matches and had stepped down as captain of India’s limited-overs formats teams in January 2017. Dhoni was part of Grade A in the BCCI’s central contracts list last year but after he had made himself unavailable since the World Cup, he was left out by BCCI from the 27-member list for the period from October 2019 to September 2020. Dinesh Karthik, Khaleel Ahmed and Ambati Rayudu are the other players to lose out on their central contracts.

Here we look at five players who got more than they deserved as far as contracts awarded to them:

1. Shikhar Dhawan

 Shikhar ‘Gabbar’ Dhawan has been awarded a Grade A contract by the BCCI for 2020. Looking at his performances across formats in the past year or so, that’s a step too much one gets the feeling. The left-hander has been very inconsistent and has struggled with poor form too. He just came out of an injury layoff and has had a decent start against Australia in the first ODI at Mumbai that India lost by ten wickets.

In 18 ODIs in 2019, Dhawan has managed to score a total of 583 runs at an average of 36.44. He has hit two centuries and two fifties in this period but his strike-rate which has been much higher than 100 always has dipped to 93. Lack of consistency and injury breaks haven’t helped the flamboyant left-handed opening batsman.

Someone who has been in and around the Test team has not played a single game in 2019. His technical deficiencies seem to have caught up with him. The likes of Mayank Aggarwal, Rohit Sharma and even Prithvi Shaw have gone up the pecking order in comparison to Dhawan.

The left-hander who has had an average year in 2019 overall with him not playing Test cricket should have been awarded a Grade B contract but got lucky as BCCI kept him in the Grade A list of players.