BANGALORE: Coimbatarao Gopinath is the last survivor from the XI that clinched India’s first Test victory, against England in Chennai in 1952. He played eight Tests across an eight-year period, missing several others because his employers wouldn’t grant him leave. A few years ago, at an event that also included Sourav Ganguly and Ravi Shastri, the current coach, Gopinath spoke of the financial hardships players endured in his time.
“It wasn’t uncommon for catches to be dropped deliberately so that the game went into a fifth day,” he said. “We were paid 50 Rupees a day as allowance. And if the game finished early, you would forfeit the fee for that day.”
Just let that sink in. If you factor in inflation, the match allowance for Gopinath and his teammates (250 Rupees) would be worth around 13,500 now. Virat Kohli’s current retainer with the national team is worth 20 million Rupees. Match fees and win bonuses are additional.
But even those sums are dwarfed by the money that Kohli will earn for leading Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) in the Indian Premier League (IPL). Having already represented the franchise for ten seasons, he was retained by them ahead of the mega auction that precedes season XI. The sum guaranteed? An eye-watering $2.7million a year.
Considering that the IPL is a six-week event, it means that Kohli will be taking home nearly as much money as Cristiano Ronaldo (on £365,000 a week) does at Real Madrid. In fact, there are only seven footballers, most of them now based in China, that earn more than Kohli will per week.
In his first season, when he was drafted in as an Under-19 player, Kohli was paid 3 million Rupees. It’s a sign of the times that Sarfaraz Khan, the third player to be retained by RCB after Kohli and AB de Villiers, will be paid 17.5 million Rupees for the season.
When Kohli was first contracted, he had already won a World Cup with the Under-19s and shown his mettle for Delhi in the Ranji Trophy. Sarfaraz too was an Under-19 star, but he has done precious little since. There was a season of big hitting in the IPL (2015), but Kohli dropped him the following year because his fitness levels were not up to the mark.
Given his mastery of the white-ball formats, the money invested on Kohli can be seen as a low-risk proposition. But the list of retained names serves as a reminder of how ruthless the franchises have become, of how there’s absolutely no room for sentiment.
Take the Mumbai Indians, the most successful team in the competition’s history, with three titles. Rohit Sharma (150 million Rupees), Hardik Pandya (110 million) and Jasprit Bumrah (70 million) have all been retained, but HarbHajjan Singh, Kieron Pollard and Lasith Malinga, who were central to Mumbai’s transformation from nearly men to the real deal, have all been sent back to the auction pool.
Mumbai do have two right-to-match cards they can use at the auction to bring those players back into the fold, but there’s no guarantee they’ll use them. Kolkata Knight Riders won two titles under Gautam Gambhir’s captaincy. But they’ve retained only Sunil Narine, who revealed another string to his bow last season with some devastating hitting at the top of the order, and Andre Russell, back after serving a drugs ban.
There’s no room at the Chennai Super Kings for Ravichandran Ashwin, the local hero, with Ravindra Jadeja the chosen spinner alongside MS Dhoni and Suresh Raina. Sunrisers Hyderabad, winners in 2016, have retained only David Warner and Bhuvneshwar Kumar. Yuvraj Singh, who helped kickstart the Twenty20 revolution in India with his six sixes off Stuart Broad at the World Twenty20 in 2007, goes back to the auction.
At least, Yuvraj, Gambhir and the others shunned by the franchises they served don’t have to worry about spending nights in a railway carriage. That was what Gopinath and his teammates did when they toured Pakistan in 1954-55. Their accommodation in Bahawalpur, where they played a Test, was a carriage in a siding.
It’s unlikely that Kohli will have to worry about the room service bill any time soon.