PCB moves to make contracts for regional players more transparent

KARACHI: The initial phase of Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB)’s plan to award central contracts to regional players will start across the country in a few days through a proper selection process, a board official said on Wednesday.
The selection will be monitored by a national selector along with regional representatives.
“The initial process of awarding these contracts will get underway soon through a proper selection process,” PCB’s General Manager domestic cricket Shafiq Ahmed Papa told ‘The News’ on Wednesday.
“The selection will be supervised by a national selector while a regional head coach and a selector will assist him.”
The selection process that will take place across the eleven regions will see the trials for regional first-class, T20, U23 and U19 teams, in addition to the selection contract recipients over a period of three days in each city. 
The contracts will be given in three categories — A, B and C. There will be five players in A category, who will receive Rs20,000, while 10 players in B class will get Rs15,000 and five players in C standard will get Rs10,000. The contracts are likely to be given for a period of six months. 
The process of awarding central contracts was abandoned after Ijaz Butt took over as PCB chief three years back.
Previously, the associations had the powers to name the players in three categories, which resulted in biased awarding. It has been learnt that keeping in view the problems involved previously in the process, the board has introduced the addition of a national selector.
Ijaz Ahmed Farooqui, the secretary Karachi City Cricket (KCCA) association said it would have been better for the players had the board raised the amount.
“The board has taken a good decision for the sake of our players but it is paying the same amount, which was given four years back and it will be very hard for players to fulfill their needs these days,” he said.
“I would request the PCB to raise the amount, next time they grant these contracts. The more board will take care of the domestic players, the more incentive they will receive to perform well.”
The board has revived the U23 cricket tournament to facilitate the players who get over the U19 age group and are left out in first-class cricket.
“The idea to reintroduce U23 regional cricket was to provide chances to the players who get over U19 setup and fail to break into first-class teams,” one of the governing board members said.
The U23 tournament, which will have no bearing on promotion or demotion of regions, has been scheduled to start in December, while the domestic T20 and U19 competition would get underway in September but the PCB has decided to take trials quite earlier, in order to wrap up selections of all teams in a certain period.

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