Revenues have dried after the pandemic and cricketing bodies seem to be eager to focus on the money side of things as far as resumption is concerned. In recent media reports, Bangladesh has now started thinking of increasing the salary of the National contracted women cricketers.
Nadel Chowdhary, who chairs the women’s wing of Bangladesh Cricket Board, in interaction with Cricbuzz, said that they have proposed an increase in the international match fees alongside a salary raise for the women cricketers. This interaction was held on Tuesday. The proposal, if accepted, will be rejuvenating for women’s cricket who have suffered from lack of resources as cricketers when compared to male cricketers of a similar stage.
It is astonishing to note that men Cricketers are rewarded a massive Six Lakh BDT as the match fees for Test. Moreover, for ODIs and T20Is, players are given BDT Three lakh and BDT two lakh respectively. The female players, on the other hand, receive 100 USD which amounts to 8500 BDT for One-day Internationals. For the shortest format, it goes surprisingly down to 75 USD. The chairman of BCB women committee accepted the situation of women players and said that increasing the salaries on the level of male counterparts seems not possible.
Shafiul Alam said that “You have to understand that there is a big difference between men and women’s cricket and we have to admit it. We cannot increase the match fees of women’s cricketers in par with their male counterpart”.
He added that “I agree the amount they what they receive as international match fees [100 USD] is very minimal in the present context and so we have proposed to increase that to USD 400”.
He informed that the board focuses on increasing the number of contracted cricketers and raise their salary by 10 to 20 per cent. He added that “It’s true with this salary certainly women cricketers find hard to survive but we cannot make the drastic change overnight and we are gradually trying to come forward with the different initiative”.
Bangladesh has given a central contract to 20 players. They are further divided into four categories with their different salary caps. BDT 50000 (A category), BDT 40000 (B category), BDT 30000 (C category) and BDT 20000(D category).
Smaller countries have made striking efforts to increase the salary caps for their players. Pakistan has been one of the best examples. It is, however, too early to believe that these actions inspire the bigger stakeholders.
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