Reduce pay disparity, save domestic red-ball cricket

Bengaluru: Thirteen-year-old Agastiya V is a batter. He’s nice with it too, very textbook. 

But something happens to him when the coach says 'last two sets'. What he goes on to do with the next 14 balls is symbolic of where cricket is now. 

Remember a time when you wouldn’t get to bat for a few days if you attempted a reverse sweep at your cricket academy? Things are different now. 

After Agastiya earns applause from his coach with a series of scoops, the reverse paddles and uppercuts, he’s asked about his plans for the future. 

The coach thinks Agastiya is going places. Agastiya believes so too, but there’s one place he’d rather be than anywhere else. 

“I want to play for RCB, that’s my dream,” he says. 

“What about playing for Karnataka?”

“That’ll be okay, but RCB…,’ he says even as his camp-mates drown out his voice. 

They too feel the same way. ‘RCB, RCB, RCB,’ they chant before getting on with their fielding drills. 

There are layers to this interaction. 

One, it’s obvious that the kids love the Indian Premier League and the idea of the Royal Challengers Bengaluru. Two, they don’t care much for playing for Karnataka. 

Herein lies a problem the Board of Control for Cricket in India must remedy. Now.

As things stand, red-ball cricket in India, aka first-class cricket, aka Ranji Trophy, will die a slow death because there are not enough measures taken to safeguard it.

At the top of that list is the pay disparity.

Surely Agastiya is too young to think of remuneration, he’s after the concept of fame fed to him for now, but there will come a time when he will want to make a living (if he gets that far) from cricket. 

At that point, would he rather get picked for the base price (Rs 20 lakh) by an IPL team, irrespective if he plays or not, or work his backside off for an entire Ranji Trophy season and earn roughly the same?

Here are the essentials: The BCCI currently pays Rs 60,000 a day to a player who has played more than 40 Ranji games, Rs 50,000 to those who have played between 21 and 40 games and Rs 40,000 to those who have featured in 20 games. The reserves earn Rs 30,000, Rs 25,000 and Rs 20,000 in the respective categories. 

Going by this, typically a senior on the side would make approximately Rs 25 lakh.

“No, man,” chuckles a senior Karnataka cricketer, who exclusively plies his wares in the Ranji Trophy. “We don’t usually play all games right so by the end of it, you may get around Rs 20 lakh, sometimes even less. At least nowadays the payments come on time (laughs).”

That’s because the BCCI digitised the payment structure and removed the role of the State associations in payment processing. The players raise their invoices and get paid directly by the BCCI. 

Great. That’s sorted. But what of the AMOUNT of money going to the players?

The last time the BCCI revised the payment structure for domestic players was in 2021. It was a telling spike from salaries of yore, but at that point, the Board hadn’t sold media rights for the IPL (for five years) for Rs 48,000 crore. 

They were not aware they were going to be worth approximately Rs 19,000 crore per annum so they weren't as generous in pay revision which also before they announced an unprecedented Rs 125 crore as a gift to the T20 World Cup-winning Indian team. 

“We are looking into what can be done to ensure domestic cricketers get paid more,” said a highly-placed source in the BCCI. “But you can’t compare IPL and domestic red-ball cricket. They are two different things. The IPL is an entirely different brand and it operates autonomously. 

“To say ‘you pay IPL cricketers so much and so you should pay domestic cricketers just like that’ is not a great argument. To say ‘we need to pay our domestic cricketers better’ is right and we are putting into place a new structure. We think we should more than double the fee so they can get to around Rs 60 lakh at least, that sounds fair, but we can’t just offer a hike without considering all the factors. There has to be some balance.”

One of the concerns the source revealed was that cricketers tend to get carried away by money and not focus on the sport, not play the sport for the sport’s sake. 

When told of the misplaced nature of that ‘concern’, he backtracks and says: “… another thing is that they don’t know how to handle their money. We’re trying to put into place a system where they have financial advisors to help them. We have seen so many people lose all their money because they were not smart about it.”

This decision maker’s ‘concerns’ cannot be taken seriously because it’s loose and it digresses from the original argument of the money not being good enough for players who don’t play the IPL.

See, the remuneration as it stands even is certainly more money than most other athletes in the country can ever dream of, but the associations they represent aren’t as well off. Their coffers are about as dry as the interest shown in running the sport.

Naturally, this pushes children to take up cricket as a career. Once there, they realise that they would rather zone in on becoming the best T20 cricketer there is to ensure a steady, hefty pay cheque rather than a smaller cheque for more effort in red-ball cricket. 

“T20 is low risk and high reward,” says an administrator. “Red-ball cricket is not like that. You have to work. T20s you can make a mistake and it will be forgiven in the name of ‘expressing yourself’, that won’t happen in Ranji. So, naturally, kids would rather play that (T20s) than this (red-ball). It also doesn’t help that the BCCI doesn’t do a good job of promoting domestic cricket.”

That’s for certain. A look at the games they chose to televise last season tells you all you need to know. 

The BCCI is easily the most well-run sports body in the country, but they do have their flaws. Besides inadequate remuneration for domestic cricketers, the lack of promotion of domestic cricket is one of them. 

They claim to understand this and also claim to be working on it, but the problem is that by the time they get around to it, an entire generation of cricketers would have already made up their minds about where their priorities lie. 

This will mean that the quality of red-ball cricketers of the patient variety will potentially dwindle, thereby reducing the quality of overall talent in the country. 

It might seem farfetched at this moment, what with us still revelling in the latest short-format triumph, but a not-so-good future is on the horizon. They’ll still call it an evolution, obviously, but is it though?

Yes, watching Agastiya’s stint at the ‘nets’ was refreshing, invigorating even, but hearing him and his clan pick RCB over Karnataka felt like the trailer for a bad horror movie, one which you cannot avoid.