Retirement news has come as a shocker, feels BCCI senior scorers

The World’s richest governing body in cricket, Board of Cricket Control in India (BCCI) has decided to release 17 scorers above the age of 60 from their match duties. They did so by either not assigning them any or by pulling them out at the last minute but never gave a thought to officially inform the scorers. This step of the governing body has led to disappointment among the scorers as the BCCI Empanelled Scorers expressed their discontent in a letter to the BCCI president Sourav Ganguly. The body conveyed that an official announcement would have been appreciated as the news dropped like a bomb.

“Announcement that ‘the forthcoming season will be your final season’ could have been more appropriate ... to enable scorers to accept the news in proper frame of mind. Instead, the news has come as a shocker,” the letter read.

A scorer, according to a TOI report, shared that they aren't employed with the BCCI and hence the body doesn't have a say as he highlighted that scorers being equated with match officials is not at all fair.

“We are not employed as such with the BCCI, so how can we be retired? Then, the umpires and match referee receive much higher match fees and pension, whereas we have no such benefits,” the scorer told TOI.

“We began scoring out of passion. We started with Rs. 50 per day. Although we had a regular employment, we had to make sacrifices. Many scorers have given up promotions in their jobs because they wanted to continue scoring in their centres,” he said.

Another key point is that no other cricketing nation has an upper age limit for scorers.

“In fact elsewhere, in many places, people take up scoring as a serious profession after they have retired from their active professional careers,” their letter to Ganguly mentions.

“We don’t need the same fitness of an umpire. As long as our vision is good and we are reasonable healthy, it should not be a problem,” the scorerI concluded.

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