Points to ponder

Faisal Shariff and Prem Panicker

The Indian national team is in Bangalore, for the pre-Zimbabwe camp.

In public view, they will be doing bleep tests and strengthening exercises, batting, bowling and fielding practise. Behind the scenes, they will be analysing results of past tours, results of previous Tests played in Harare, fine-tuning strategy.

And also privately fine-tuning their own -- as in, the players' -- brief detailing the possible ways and means to implement the contract system they have been working towards.

Ah yes -- according to sections of the media, the players do not want a contract system. That is merely a figment of rediff's imagination, buttressed by manufactured quotes. But we'll get to that a bit later in the programme.

For now, to keep the focus on the contract system, there are two questions that need to be answered, in order to draw up the blueprint for such a system. One is, who picks the players who will be favoured with contracts, and how. The other is, where does the money come from, who does it go to, and how much.

We'll stay with the first question, for today, and take up the financial aspect in a follow-up piece tomorrow. The Indian selection system is zonal. It follows, therefore, that for a contract system to be really meaningful, you need to back up a national lot of contracted players with a zonal equivalent, at the earliest possible -- the Utopian goal, of course, being to spread it still further, to the point where each state has its own set of contracted players.

The overall intention is two-fold -- one, to build, invest in, and maintain a bank of players, on a pyramidal structure, so that at any given point, there are talented state players capable of moving up to the zonal level, and zonal players being nurtured as alternatives to the national players, as and when required.

So can they be selected?

You need to start someplace, so a good starting point could be to look at the Australian model, and see how they do it. This model, it needs mentioning, was carefully fine-tuned by the ACB in tandem with the players' association headed by Tim May.

How it works is, the ACB asks selectors, individually, to rank their best 20 Test players and best 20 ODI players. Besides the overall rankings, players are ranked in such areas as expected usage over the 12-month period of the contracts, their performance over the past 12 months, the nature of opposition they have encountered and will encounter, fitness, attitude, team spirit, and team balance.

If a player is number one in any of these categories, he gets 20 points. Weightage is given at the rate of 1.25 for Tests, as opposed to 1 for ODIs -- incidentally, making it very clear where Australia's long-term priorities lie.

The points logged by the various selectors are then collated and averaged out, and players are ranked on the basis of their final tally of points, and their retainers fixed in direct co-relation to the points they accrue.

The same process, at state level, is used to pick the contracted players for each state, for the year.

The ACB is at this point in time in the process of putting together a comprehensive document that will detail the rights and responsibilities of all contracted players as set out in various codes including the Player Contract, the Code of Behavior, the Religion and Racial Vilification code, the ACB policy on Drugs in Sport and so on.

There will be clauses preventing contracted players from appearing in matches not sanctioned by the ACB -- a measure introduced to protect the players from private promoters.

The document also incorporates penalty clauses to come into effect when a player behaves in a fashion contrary to what has been spelt out in the contract and the various codes. And this document has teeth, unlike many of the codes the ICC, and various national boards, put out. Thus, it will be recalled that shortly before the Australian team left for India, Mark Waugh had refused to testify before the ICC's corruption commission head, Sir Paul Congdon. The ACB invoked the contract, threatened Waugh with suspension, and got the player to toe the line.

The bottom line is that the thinking revolves around two crucial points -- rights, and responsibilities. As the ACB spells it out, the player has a right to consider a future in cricket, a right to expect that the game will in turn provide him with a decent livelihood, starting from the moment he is first marked out as a player of potential, right through to his retirement (a bit more on this in the follow-up article tomorrow, which deals with the economic aspects of the contract system).

All of which sounds pretty sound, and logical -- and makes for a good starting point for the board and the players, when they get down to actually working out the specifics of an Indian model.

We need to mention, here, that much of the information provided above was provided by Dr Cameron Battesby, ACB director since 1987, in response to our request.

And speaking of sources, there is one minor question to be addressed -- namely, is the contract system story for real? Do the players actually want this? Or is this a concoction of rediff?

These questions have been asked -- extremely frequently -- in the emails we received, ever since certain sites put out stories to the effect that we had concocted quotes from Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, et al. We have even received emails informing us that since we did not care to defend our story, the only possible conclusion is that the whole thing was a lie. And that, therefore, rediff's reputation was in tatters.

We did not defend our story because we did not need to -- through the five plus years of our existence, players from the seniormost to the newest rookie on the block have spoken to us, extensively and on record, and never once let us down by denying the statements they made to us. And during that same period of time, we have not had to retract on a story.

Yes, Sachin spoke to us about the contract -- as you can hear, in his own voice.

Yes, Dravid spoke to us on the same subject. As did Kumble, and a few others.

So where did the confusion come from?

We spoke to Sachin Tendulkar over the phone. He clarified that on the occasion referred to by the media reports mentioned above, he was surrounded by several people asking questions all at once.

One such question, he told us, was whether he had given any interviews on the contract system. "The interview I gave rediff.com was a lengthy, exhaustive one, so in the rush of the moment I didn't think of that when this question was asked. So I said no."

The bottomline, Sachin Tendulkar said, was that he was not denying the interview given to us.

We asked Sachin if it was okay with him for us to put these words on record, and got his approval on a faxed copy of the above quote. He further told us that his opinions on the contract system, as told to us, stands undiluted.

Rahul Dravid, for his part, said that at no point has any reporter other than from rediff asked him any question about the contract system, and therefore the question of his denying his quotes did not even arise.

One other question has been raised, in various emails: Why do players tell one journalist something, and promptly deny it, next day, to another journalist. Does this mean they are neither united on, nor serious about, the question?

Again, we checked with the senior players. The answer to the first is, they have never been asked the specific question: 'What do you think of the contract system?' So, they haven't had to respond to it, ergo, the question of saying one thing today and another tomorrow does not arise.

As to the other, about whether they are serious enough about it, the fact that they responded to us as above should be indication enough of their seriousness.

As mentioned earlier, part two of this article, looking at the economics of a contract system, will appear tomorrow.

Also read:
United we stand - Faisal Shariff
Terms of endearment - Faisal Shariff
Player contracts - Readers' opinion
Money Tree - Prem Panicker
Of the players, by the players... - Faisal Shariff
A question of answers - Prem Panicker