Former players laud pay hike for domestic players

NEW DELHI: Reacting to BCCI's recent introduction of 200 percent salary hike for domestic cricketers, former players like Dilip Vengsarkar, Pravin Amre and

L Sivaramakrishnan

hailed the move and said that more youngsters will take up the game as professionals.


"With limited jobs for sportspersons, this kind of money at the domestic level is good for cricket. The BCCI has done a good job by creating this kind of pay structure. Everyone can't play for India, but if you are good you can still make a good career out of this game," Vengsarkar said.

"The Indian team too deserves the hike. They are now being paid at par with the Australian cricketers, which is what it should be," Vengsarkar, who advocated professional selectors more than a decade age, said.

His junior colleague from yesteryears, Amre too echoed the same sentiments by saying that cricketers can now play the game both for passion and as a profession. "There are several drop-outs at the Under-19 all over India. With this new payment structure in place, the state level cricketers can make at least like the top MBA recruits in our country. More and more young cricketers would be motivated to take cricket as their career," Amre pointed out.

With BCCI promising Rs 35,000 per day, a domestic cricketer can earn upto Rs 70 lakh with 50 playing days in a year. Amre also said that the money will grow in the coming years to make this game more profitable for the youngsters. "The South African players, way back in 1999, had two kinds of contract. One for playing international cricket and the second one for domestic levels. The same thing is happening in India. It's really a good news," Amre said.

Someone who has seen tremendous amount of domestic cricket as a commentator, L Sivaramakrishnan, too sounded pretty optimistic about the future of the game. Which means, a top domestic cricketer with an IPL contract of Rs 20 lakh each could end up making nearly Rs 50 per year from domestic cricket. "Today the parents encourage their kids to play cricket like parents would in the 1980s and 1990s used to encourage their kids to become an engineer or a doctor. Now that cricket has become a similar profession, parents go out of their way and sacrifice and kids work hard from a young age aspiring to play for the country but in a vast country like India, some cricketers are unlucky to miss the bus.

"Those who are playing only domestic cricket should be suitably rewarded to be financially secure and this raise will put them on par with the earnings of an engineer. This is a great move to ensure that those cricketers who are good enough to play for at least 10 years of domestic cricket to be financially independent in their future. Apart from domestic cricket if they play IPL then it's wonderful for aspiring cricketers," Siva added.