Players make pitch for contracts
Faisal Shariff in Bangalore
At around 1 pm today, five senior players -- Saurav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Javagal Srinath and Anil Kumble -- walked into a meeting room at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore.
Awaiting them was the BCCI's honorary joint secretary, Professor Ratnakar Shetty. And the sole point on the agenda was to discuss a request, made by the five on behalf of all players, that the board seriously consider, and implement at the earliest, a contract system.
"It is not going to happen overnight, lots of thought has to go into it," Prof Shetty told rediff before the meeting. "Even from the players point of view there is much thinking to be done, for instance right now only 50 per cent of their match fees are taxed, but once they turn professional, all their earnings will be liable for taxation, that is just one of the things that they need to think about."
Today's meeting, which is on at the time of writing this, is thus preliminary in nature -- intended, first, to place the request on the table and secondly, to decide how to go from here.
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