BARBADOS: West Indies players will be offered more flexible and enhanced contracts, including exclusive retainers for Test and limited-overs cricket, according to a new Cricket West Indies policy. The highest-paid category will be for players who feature in Tests and ODIs, with a maximum retainer of over $300,000 including match fees. The four-man selection panel, led by Courtney Browne, has shortlisted players for every category, which is expected to be made public soon. The new contract policy is one of CWI CEO Johnny Grave’s visions for the board, along with the previously-announced amnesty. The policy has three levels, and will initially last for nine months. The new contracts will be offered on July 1, 2018, at the same time as the domestic retainer contracts.
The contracts have been split into three categories. Category A will comprise players who play predominantly Tests and ODIs. Category B will be for only Test players, while Category C will cover players featuring in only ODIs and T20s. Six players have been offered first batch of white-ball contracts (Category C): Carlos Brathwaite, Jason Mohammed, Evin Lewis, Rovman Powell, Ashley Nurse and Kesrick Williams.
According to Grave, CWI will keep player remuneration private and confidential. He also highlighted that a player contracted in Category A can earn over $300,000, independent of domestic T20 deals, while players in other contract categories will also stand to earn six-figure retainers. The dollar value of the new retainers are more than double the previous highest-earning contracts that have been offered to players in the past three years following the abandoned 2014 tour to India.
Under the previous contract arrangement, players were contracted for one year only. A category A contract was worth $140,000, Category B $120,000 and Category C $100,000, with highly reduced match retainers that were redirected to pay domestic players in the revamped Professional Cricket League.
Although CWI has not confirmed this, it is understood that individual match fees for ODIs and T20s (reduced after the 2014 abandonment to $2500 and $1500), will now be $5000 and $2500 per match respectively. Grave said that another significant decision CWI was taking was extending the existing Memorandum of Understanding with the West Indies Players’ Association (WIPA) by another year. “The first thing we did was extend the CWI-WIPA MoU by one year until the end of the 2019 World Cup cycle”, Grave told ESPNcricinfo. “While the overall aim was to create flexible contracts, when I realised the MoU was ending in 2018, but yet our television and sponsorship deals were ending in 2019, it made sense to extend it and link our major revenues with WIPA.”
Grave further explained why only six players received Category C contracts, highlighting they were solely chosen by the selection panel. “I create paper work and numbers, selectors chose those to award contracts. Jimmy (Jimmy Adams, CWI director of cricket) and I weren’t involved in that.” None of West Indies’ high-profile players have been offered contracts yet. Chris Gayle, Sunil Narine, Andre Russell, Kieron Pollard, Darren Bravo, Dwayne Bravo, Marlon Samuels, Samuel Badree and Darren Sammy will all be offered pro-rata contracts based on their performances in the upcoming series in the short term.
Published in Daily Times, December 15th 2017.