Ashwin granted top grade BCCI contract, Harbhajan demoted

Mumbai  :  Leg-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin was granted the top grade contract while out of favour Harbhajan Singh was demoted to the second bracket in the new contract list announced by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) here Friday.

The BCCI granted central contracts to 37. Nine are in Grade A (Rs.1 crore/$186,000), eight in Grade B (Rs 50 lakh/$93,000) and 20 in Grade C (Rs 25 lakh/$46,500).

Fast bowlers S. Sreesanth and Jaydev Unadkat have been dropped from the list of central contracts while L. Balaji, Ashok Dinda, Irfan Pathan and Yusuf Pathan have been granted retainer contracts of Rs.25 lakh after missing out last year.

Grade A: Sachin Tendulkar, M.S. Dhoni, Zaheer Khan, Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Suresh Raina, Yuvraj Singh, Virat Kohli, R Ashwin.

Grade B: Harbhajan Singh, Ishant Sharma, Pragyan Ojha, Rohit Sharma, Cheteshwar Pujara, Ajinkya Rahane, Irfan Pathan, Umesh Yadav.

Grade C: Ravindra Jadeja, Amit Mishra, Vinay Kumar, Munaf Patel, Abhimanyu Mithun, M. Vijay, Shikhar Dhawan, Wriddhiman Saha, Parthiv Patel, Manoj Tiwary, S Badrinath, Piyush Chawla, Dinesh Karthik, Rahul Sharma, Varun Aaron, Abhinav Mukund, Ashok Dinda, Yusuf Pathan, Praveen Kumar, L. Balaji.