Aussie Cricket
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@barbarian the AFL deal changed everything i reckon. They got so much money for a product with no international market, so the NRL and cricket have gone "whoa, yea, time to get paid bitches". NRL got more, but 9 gave up a bit for it, as Foxtel now get to show every game live (except Origin and the GF).
But they can probably show increasing viewer numbers. With cricket, I doubt that is the case.
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@Bovidae A bit like Steve Tew and Sky?
I reckon Cricket Australia have a stronger negotiating position with more competitive options than NZR.
I think it's a symbiotic relationship - both parties need the other and Nine can't stiff CA too hard, because ultimately it will degrade their product. If Steve Smith buggers off on the T20 circuit, Australia lose the Ashes....
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How did i miss this Facebook page while the India tour was on? It's pretty fucking clever
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@Chris-B. said in Aussie Cricket:
Maybe a bit like Sky and rugby in NZ. I don't expect they're that thrilled with how Super rugby is going (which probably contributes significantly to the subscriptions they've apparently been shedding), but it will be a cold day in hell that they let anyone else outbid them on rugby.
That's shit management then. If the product loses you money and doesn't have tangible, quantifiable benefits elsewhere, only a moron would continue such a business practice.
@Chris-B. said in Aussie Cricket:
@Bovidae A bit like Steve Tew and Sky?
I reckon Cricket Australia have a stronger negotiating position with more competitive options than NZR.
According to the article, there's one real option for CA.
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@antipodean There are tangible benefits elsewhere. Tew has stated on various occasions that it's test rugby that makes money for NZR and both Super rugby and NPC run at a loss, so it wouldn't surprise me if the same is the case for Sky. But, rugby is bound up in a whole large package for Sky and is pretty clearly an integral part of making that package profitable, even if rugby per se (and certainly parts of it) might not be.
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That's why I said if it 'doesn't have tangible, quantifiable benefits elsewhere'. I'm familiar with the concept of loss leaders but my point is you can't become wedded to a product - it has to make commercial sense.
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@antipodean said in Aussie Cricket:
my point is you can't become wedded to a product - it has to make commercial sense.
Remarkably, I'm familiar with that concept too.
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quick quick, organise a test series against Australia next week! As of Saturday, there isn't an employed cricketer in this country.
The new pay deal needed to be sorted out, and it's devolved in to a WW1 style war of entrenched positions, neither side appears willing to budge.
From what i understand, it's a case of the players wanting the same funding model for their pay that they have always had (except including more, obviously) while Cricket Australia wants to break up that percentage of revenue model, and have a more direct contracting structure. They've made a few concessions along the way, but have stayed pretty true to their original position. While the players union isn't budging from their views that the current model should continue.
CA have tried to go around the union and negotiate with players directly, but they seem very unified, and all of those offers have been rejected. It's about to start affecting the on-field, as the Australia A tour of South Africa was supposed to leave on Friday, and they aren't going at this stage. Although i see the women's team is playing the world cup?
It's ugly, and the tour to Bangladesh, and even the Ashes are the next battlefields. It appears that the CA have the support of the international boards, so i can't see pressure coming from there to produce the best Aus team. The next couple of months will be very interesting.
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It's a fascinating saga. I really side with the players on this one, and have no idea why CA are so insistent on playing hardball. This is a great article from Gideon Haigh:
And I like this one from Joe Aston in the AFR as well:
Cricket Australia's David Peever is living in Narnia
Is Peever and his board hallucinating or are they all just waiting for Aslan?
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@mariner4life said in Aussie Cricket:
CA have tried to go around the union and negotiate with players directly, but they seem very unified, and all of those offers have been rejected.
They're unified until they can't pay their bills.
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@barbarian ugh, pay walled
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Fuck there is some money in cricket here.
If a player plays Shield, Ryobi Cup (one-dayers) and the BBL they can make $250K+ a season. Without ever playing an international. I find it admirable that the only reason this can happen is that the international players pretty much subsidise it.
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@Paekakboyz Here is Gideon:
The waiting, at least, is over. The last nine months of interchange between Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers’ Association have moved at the pace at which glaciers proverbially used to run; from here it may be more like they run now, which is suddenly, unpredictably and destructively. Perhaps it had to get to this point. Certainly that appears to have been the perspective of CA, seemingly content to run the clock down, indulging every so often in a stagey reveal or barely veiled threat. And maybe the cricketers grew to mirror them, sensing their options, feeling their oats. Whatever the case, the parties could be about to waste more money than this dispute is worth to either of them. Blame for that lies largely with CA, on whom it was incumbent to explain the need to alter the status quo, and to do better than airy and faintly opportunistic invocations of “grassroots”. Cricket’s “grassroots” are under pressure. But that’s because of a vastly complex nexus of forces, from atomised working weeks and changing demographics to inflated property prices and the ideological drift of local government, and only at the margin because cricketers derive their rewards from a cut of cricket’s revenue. Perhaps it would be different were CA intending, for example, to use an expanded kitty to grant every Australian cricket club $10,000 — not, by the way, the silliest idea, essentially a kind of microfinance initiative. Yet CA’s intended strategy for tending said “grassroots” has been no better articulated than involving a significant expansion of its own headcount. Bureaucracy always thinks it knows what’s best. Arguments against the current cricket pay model are not without force — and it’s as well to observe here that there is no “right’ way, no “optimum” international model against which to benchmark. If one was redesigning Australian cricket on a clean sheet of paper, paying players from revenue might well not be how you would do things. But, like it or not, it is the starting point — a simple, robust, mature and flexible mechanism with a 20-year record of demonstrable effectiveness in aligning the interests of players and administrators, and to the former granting a certain dignity after 90 years of their predecessors being treated like the hired help. Players also object, quite understandably, to being presented as impediments to the game’s progress, especially by individuals whose connection to the interests they purport to champion is so tenuous. Some more sophisticated observers have summoned up the bugaboo of the $200,000 domestic cricketer playing Sheffield Shield in front of yawning stands. This is misleading. Firstly, barely one in 20 Shield cricketers earns anything even in this neighbourhood; the median income is less than half that. Secondly, Shield cricket’s output is not spectacle, or entertainment, or media property. It is cricketers. And in this respect it is hardly “unsustainable”. Domestic cricket has nurtured Peter Handscomb; international cricket now stands to earn the return on him. So it has worked immemorially. Thirdly, a point so obvious as hardly ever to be made, cricket is a risky occupation. What proportion of practitioners grow genuinely wealthy by it? One allots it one’s youthful prime; one builds one’s life around its pursuit; its end leaves, eventually, a sizeable hole, in income, qualifications, health, other life experience. What risks do CA’s pampered executive incur while running their lucrative monopoly? Apart from those they’re creating themselves, I mean. For, at least at this point, that’s the rub of it. Many figures have been bandied out in the dispute, but the figure that should concentrate the minds of all involved is the figure we don’t know: the cost of trashing cricket’s biggest assets, and leaving a legacy of ill-will that could last a generation. Two decades’ earnest and constructive endeavour have gone into persuading Australian cricket and cricketers to at least look in the same direction, if never quite march in lock-step. All it has taken to reawaken the race memory of overmighty administrators lording it over players has been some sour emails from James Sutherland and Pat Howard, and Kevin Roberts’ funniest home videos. All it has taken to squander years of zealous, idealistic work in women’s cricket is that from next week every one of the players patiently built up in the public mind through the Women’s Big Bash League will be out of contract. Last year, Cricket NSW gave itself a huge pat on the back for raising the NSW Breakers to professional status, encouraging players to forsake their existing jobs. Next week they are without work. Have you heard a peep of regret about this? You won’t, because to CA this is good. It is a strategic advantage, a negotiating pressure point. Make the female players sweat a bit, and you might breach the ACA’s lines of resistance. So clever! Or maybe too clever by half. Because eventually everyone will revert to their former roles. With what attitudes, regrets, distrusts, bitternesses will they do so? Every minute this dispute continues, meanwhile, years of public goodwill, dollars of commercial value and hours of manpower are wasted. For what point the expensive infrastructure of the game if there are no players to tend, coach, pick, sell? To what end all the spin doctors, marketers, executives, even directors? The suspicion lurks that CA’s board is drawn on by the vision splendid of a sleek, shiny, top-down controlled, matrix-managed corporate machine in which obedient automata meet hurdle rates of cricket return while a captive media yells rah-rah. Kevin Roberts apparently refers to cricketers as CA’s “internal customers” — there’s one for your next compendium, Don Watson. Does this sound like a game you’d love? Cricket actually needs its rough edges, its push and pull, its checks and balances, even its inefficiencies and anomalies; it needs David Warner to drive whatever car he wants, because it stimulates, glamorises, annoys; and it needs administrators to grasp that, in this instance, the perfect is the enemy of the good. -
@barbarian cheers bro!
Does CA think they'll be seen as weak by other countries if they don't curb 'player power'?? Their approach seems to be halting any chance of changing the payment model. Players should definitely get their fair share, but the investment in cricket in Australia needs to be clear and present too.
Who will flinch first!!
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That article is long on romanticism, (which i would expect from someone who loves the game as much as he does) and short on detail.
He's right about CA being a bit ambiguous about why the model needs changing though.
The last sentence is complete crap though. Every "rough edge" cricket once had has been sanded off by current commercial interests, changing the model isn't going to do that, it's already done.
I am pretty much on the players side here, especially given the international players seem happy to make sure everyone gets a share of the money they generate. However i am always a little wary of the top end getting too much of the current pie, just in case the very bottom gets neglected (see Australian Rugby)
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I like Brett Geeve's take. He focuses more on the visuals being put forward by the ACA, despite completely agreeing with their stance.
