Dwayne Bravo has said the Board of Control for Cricket in India offered to pay the West Indies players who had threatened to pull out of the 2014 one-day series in India after a contracts dispute with their board.
Bravo, who recently retired from international cricket, said he had received a message at 3 am from N Srinivasan, the BCCI president at the time, with the offer. Bravo then tried to convince his team to play the first ODI after they had threatened to pull out.
“I remember fully well before we said we weren’t going to play the first game, 3 am in the morning, I get a message from the BCCI boss, the old one, Mr Srinivasan, that ‘please take the field’,” Bravo told i995 FM, a radio station in Trinidad & Tobago.
Bravo, at the time, was also playing for the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League. The franchise is owned by Srinivasan’s company India Cements.
“I listened to him – and woke up at 6 am to tell the team that we have to play. And everyone was against playing. Everyone thought that I panicked and chickened out and all these things,” Bravo said.
“Collectively as a team, we decided what to do. I listened to every single player. Apart from one player, everyone signed on a piece of paper, that they were all in support of leaving the tour.”
Big money was at stake but Bravo said the BCCI understood their problems. “They were very supportive of all of us,” the former all-rounder “Actually they even offered to pay us whatever we were losing. We was like, ‘We don’t want you to pay us. We need our board to sort out our contracts.’”
He added, “The BCCI was very, very supportive and that is one of the reasons why most of us were still able to continue playing without any serious, serious problems taking place.”
The West Indies eventually played three ODIs but in the middle of the fourth, in the hill town of Dharamsala, the West Indies Cricket Board informed the BCCI that it had decided to call off the remainder of tour.
With inputs from PTI