BCCI to finalise player contracts on Friday

Sometime on Friday evening, the final details regarding the annual central contracts for India's cricketers will be decided. Sharad Pawar, the BCCI president, Niranjan Shah, the secretary, Kiran More, the chairman of selectors, and Greg Chappell, the coach, will meet in Mumbai and finalise the list of players who will receive contracts for the forthcoming year. However an announcement from the board on the list of contracted players will only happen on Saturday morning, after the selectors pick the squad for the Pakistan tour.

The players are guaranteed a sizeable raise in payments. But this is only to be expected, as the players' salaries are a percentage of the overall profits of the board, and this sum has gone up every year. At the moment the BCCI has allocated 26% of total profits towards payment of players' salaries. Of this, 13% goes towards payments to the national team, while 13% goes to payments of domestic cricketers, cricketers who go on A-tours etc. It is expected that the premier slab A will fetch Rs 80 lakh to 1 crore (previously Rs 50 lakh), the second slab Rs 60-70 lakh (previously 35 lakh) and the last slab Rs 30-40 lakh (previously 20 lakh).

Irfan Pathan is likely to be the only addition to the premier category, while it is not clear whether Sourav Ganguly will remain in the A grade. "It is too early to say anything at this stage. It has not even been decided how many people will get contracts or in which category. So we can't really say where a specific individual stands," a BCCI source told Cricinfo. "Everything will be discussed in detail at the meeting on Friday evening."

Ganguly was an automatic selection for the A grade last year, as captain of the team, but currently he figures neither in the Test team nor in the ODI team. If he continues to be out of the team, and does not figure in the long-term plans of the management, there's every chance he will lose out on top billing. It is, however, expected that he will get a B-grade contract.

On Friday another high-powered committee - the marketing committee - is set to meet, at a suburban hotel in Mumbai at 11am, to open the bids for the logo sponsorship on the non-leading arm of t-shirts of India's cricketers. The main sponsorship, for the leading arm, has already gone to Sahara, who will fork out Rs 313 crore over four years.