Among all the cricket playing countries in the world, there’s no country that has as involved viewers as India does. Often Indians celebrate the team India’s victory strongly but they take the defeat equally hard on themselves. Sometimes their involvement is dangerously strong in judging the team’s performance that they go to the extent of burning the effigy’s of players and vandalizing players houses when team India’s performance is not up to their expectation. On top of it all, when a player is paid 1.5 lakhs of rupees/ ODI irrespective of his performance, it is an insult.
BCCI’s recent decision to hold the players accountable by paying them for their performance is a welcome move. The hard task would be to devise a performance evaluation methodology and choosing unbiased evaluators. Simply looking at the ‘win’ and a ‘loss’ as signs of good and poor performances would be an injustice to a player. A team may have poured their heart out only to lose doesn’t mean the team’s performance is poor or there may be one or two players in a team who may have performed exceptionally well to record a win when the team as a whole fared poorly doesn’t mean that the team deserves a reward.
Entrusting the task of performance evaluation to a group of people is asking for enormous subjectivity. There could be regional, religious, linguistic and personal acquaintance biases which couldn’t be ruled out. It is the need of the hour to evolve an efficient yet effective methodology to evaluate the performance of our cricketers. We need web enabled evaluation where our players are paid on variable basis for their performance.
Players pay must be split into three equal categories namely base pay, individual performance and team performance. For example, ODI pay can be split into 50 thousand rupees for each category and the base pay is paid irrespective of performance. Performance evaluation is done by the people on BCCI’s web site day after the ODI for a day. Using people to be the evaluators is drawn from the success story of “American Idol” where people who choose the winners and the winners do go on to become competitive performers.
Evaluation will be done in two sequential pages (one meant for the team performance and other for the individual performance) where an evaluator cannot go into the next page without completing the first page. Evaluation completion in its entirety only should be accepted as valid. Individual player/ team performance will be gauged on “Excellent”, “Good”, “Neutral”, “Fair” and “Poor” scales using evaluator’s own discretion. Scale will swing the pay between 100% (for “Excellent” rank) and 20% (for “Poor” rank) with graduation of 20% points between each rank. Minimum of 50,000 evaluations must be recorded in each category for the payment to be effective failing which a player will be entitled to full pay. Only one evaluation/ IP address must be accepted.
For example, if a player is adjudged “Fair” for individual performance and “Good” for the team performance, his total pay will be 1.1 lakh rupees (50 K base pay, 20 K individual pay and 40 K team pay). Player is assured of 70 K even in case of poor ranking in both categories (50 K base pay, least pay of 10 K for individual and team performances each) which more than 50% is cut from the present pay of 1.50 lakhs.
This method empowers people to be part of reward/ punishment for team’s performance apart from enabling BCCI to promote e-commerce (selling merchandise and selling space for commercials) in a large scale. This methodology also helps the team selectors to know about an individual player’s performance from people perspective which could be factored into their professional perspective in making a future selection.
Cricketers need to understand the chemistry between them and the cricket viewers. Cricketers’ talent is viewers’ entertainment and they pay for it. Viewers are disappointed when they fail to see the value for their money. People don’t expect to see team India win every game but they do want them to give their best every time.
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