Let's say there are two kinds of players in world cricket: Player A and Player B. (If it's easier to picture Player A as, say, a New Zealand men's international and Player B as, I don't know, a Pakistani men's international, by all means go ahead.)
Player A is employed by an organisation. On top of basic financial remuneration, the player receives a range of perks of a kind most stable jobs offer: holidays, parental leave, sound medical care. They are also represented by a labour association that looks out for their best interests, during their playing career and after. Their employer is sensitive to the fact that the work landscape is changing and that this is the age of the gig economy. There are ever more opportunities out there for their employees, which allow the players not only to future-proof themselves financially but also to evolve and develop as cricketers while active. A central contract for Player A offers security and is, broadly speaking, a tool for empowering them.
This an unexceptional paragraph of fact in most situations except in the situation of cricket because Player B is also, on paper, employed by an organisation. But that is where the similarities end. In reality Player B is not so much an employee as someone on the wrong side of an unbalanced power equation. Player B could have a 60-page contract with not a single mention of holiday policy or time off. Player B's contract reads more like a thin book of strictures, fattened by a detailed spelling out of the punitive consequences should they do that which they should not. Player B has no recourse to a player association that looks out for their best interests. A central contract for Player B offers the employer a means of control, emasculating the employee in a manner that takes their status close to indentured servitude.
If Player A foregoes a central contract, they are not ostracised by their board. They have an adult discussion about priorities and commitments and areas of overlap, which might be to the potential benefit of both parties. If Player B foregoes a central contract, on the other hand, they're dead to the board. Socially they are seen in similar ways to betrayers or deserters.
For Player A, an NOC (no-objection certificate) to play in a franchise league is a formality. For Player B, the NOC is merely a symbol of their powerlessness and exploitation. It's a little like the global tyranny of visas. A sizeable minority of people doesn't think about visas at all, jetting off to another country at a minute's notice. The majority, meanwhile, suffocates under the weight of the requirement, spending half their lives filling out visa forms and paying exorbitant fees for the pleasure, and the other half waiting anxiously for them to be granted. If your visa doesn't come through, tough (and suck up the financial hit) but at least you can envy-scroll through the Insta feeds of that minority, eh?
These are broad, non-specific sketches. There are shades of course: some Player As are not as well off as other Player As, and some Player Bs are not as oppressed as other Player Bs. But the point is this: central contracts have become a modern bellwether for the health of the international game. When they were first widely adopted, a quarter of a century ago, they were celebrated as a game-changing step in the professionalisation of the game. (Australia, forever ahead of the curve, have had them since the mid-'80s). Now when players turn them down, it's a sign that the international game is fading into irrelevance; the ECB chief executive, Richard Gould, called contracting "an existential issue" earlier this year, before overhauling the system to try and make the ECB as attractive an employer in the marketplace as a Chennai Super Kings.
Except that it isn't as simple as that because, as Player A and Player B show, central contracts might have started off with the same promise but they now represent multiple realities. Yes, turning them down (or choosing shorter deals as some England players did ) in one part of the cricket world - let's lump Australia, New Zealand and England together, clumsily, as a western bloc - suggests that international cricket is no longer what it was. But in South Asia, cricket's biggest population, where the game is that much bigger, the option of turning a central contract down doesn't really exist. Some players might be minded to, but turning down those who run the game is still seen as a snub in these parts, not an employment choice. So what does it say about international cricket there, where central contracts are desirable and exploitative?
By opting out of their contracts, for example, Kane Williamson and Trent Boult were essentially making choices for their work-life balance. There are few, if any, who can think of doing that in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or India.
On paper, Imad Wasim and Mohammad Amir did pretty much what Boult did: opt out of central contracts, but still be available to return to play in a big ICC event. In reality, both first fell out with the PCB because of tensions over their availability for Pakistan, and NOCs, then had to make a public show of retiring so they could get those NOCs, and then had to take back their retirements to be available for Pakistan again. And that's to say nothing of the toxicity that surrounded all this, the sniping from ex-players, coaches, selectors and fans; pretty much what Boult did in the same way ice is pretty much like fire.
Ishan Kishan took a break for "personal reasons" (a phrasing that in itself puts one in the mind of those old Bollywood days when flowers were used to symbolise on-screen kisses) late last year and promptly lost his place in the side and from the central contracts pool . If Usama Mir had been a citizen of any of the western bloc countries, he would have filed and won a restraint of trade case against the board for refusing him an NOC, as the PCB did . Yet as a Pakistani cricketer he can't even think about quitting his central contract, because, well, see Player B in the third para above. And because even without a contract, he'll still need to rely on the board's good graces to issue him an NOC, so it's best not to piss them off.
Not that long ago, of course, Player A was in a similar bind. Remember the agitations of Kevin Pietersen in 2012, wanting to play a full season of the IPL even as it clashed with his England commitments ? It's taken time for the ECB and NZC and CA to arrive at the pragmatism and flexibility they exhibit today. In truth, they had no choice because of a truly bonkers cricket calendar and labour laws in their countries. And it's something to hear Tom Latham say that more flexibility is needed . By contrast, Player B is discovering that the more complex the calendar gets, the more their board treats it as the Ming vase to their hammer.
It would be remiss to not mention West Indian cricketers here, who were the first to collectively push against the inadequacies of the central contracts system in this new world. But they are somewhat unique in hovering somewhere between - or maybe being a bit of both - Player A and Player B. They have agitated and been punished by board administrations, but also been supported by a strong players' association and reaped rewards. Pioneering, perhaps, rather than unique.
Ultimately central contracts are only a symptom. It is, as the World Cricketers' Association (WCA, formerly FICA) has unfailingly been reminding us for over a decade, the scheduling, stupid . Two parallel cricket calendars, international and domestic franchise leagues, running side by side through the year, every year, neither shrinking; two calendars, let's not forget, designed by the same people, only, pretending as if each were drawn up in isolation from their own selves.
No wonder Tom Moffat, the WCA chief executive, says his organisation has all but given up hope that these same people will ever come together and formulate a workable structure. A soon-to-be-published WCA survey, says Moffat, will show that players want the WCA to put forward some solutions. Eighty-four per cent of players surveyed want ring-fenced windows during which either only T20 leagues are being played or only international cricket, and not both concurrently.
Good luck with that. The geographical footprint of cricket is one thing: how do you squeeze leagues in North America and the Caribbean, in Australia and the subcontinent, in the UK and southern Africa, into a couple of windows? Plus, the bilateral calendar is hardly uniform, and lately the white-ball portion of it has started feeling especially random. And there are ICC events every year now.
Instead, it might be simpler to do what cricket is doing anyway at the moment, which is to sit back and wait for the BCCI to do something about it. And the BCCI is currently engaged in a face-off with itself for which, by way of explanation, I can't think of anything better than that Spiderman meme . On one side is the richest board in world cricket, doing more than its bit for international cricket, touring as many countries as it can (apart from one, natch), engaging in pointless bilaterals with countries that need them but also playing five-Test series and prioritising the World Test Championship, and paying its cricketers handsomely to play international cricket. On the other is the board that owns the richest, most expansionist T20 league in the game with one window already carved out for it and other windows being created in other parts of the world by franchises from that league. And it doesn't allow its players to go play in those leagues, or any others.
Recently, the BCCI publicly reasserted the primacy of India duty above the IPL , which is - how to put it - interesting times. The rest of the world will have to wait to see how that plays out (or if at all it does because, you know, inertia is not unknown in Indian cricket administration). And then, as the phrase goes, adjust accordingly.
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