Aussie Cricket
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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.
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Yesterday CA Chairman David Peever wrote an opinion piece in the Australian. Today Gideon Haigh gave him both barrels. It's an incredible article:
Medium is the message for cricket boss David Peever Marshall McLuhan’s contention that “the medium is the message” remains so beloved of opinion page pundits that it’s overdue a run in the sports pages. And this week’s contribution to the game’s pay dispute by Cricket Australia chairman David Peever could hardly be improved on as an illustration. For those who dimly recollect a McLuhan bowling seam-up for Western Suburbs or playing on the half-forward flank for Carlton, he was a Canadian philosopher who argued that the form of a message is every bit as significant as its content. And that, in a dispute as much about authority as it is money, should guide our interpretation of Peever’s having his say via a column published in this newspaper yesterday: that is, he chose not to appear, not to answer questions, not to incur the risk of interruption or contradiction, but simply to publish, in order to control. Peever said some things — we’ll get to those. Yet the step itself was almost as self-revelatory as the moment a couple of months ago when CA condemned the Australian Cricketers Association for issuing a press release by issuing a press release. So what did Peever say? Alas, not much. The first four paragraphs foamed with indignation — “most tawdry”, “complete myth”, “deeply insulting”, “deliberately fabricated”, “disrespects all those involved across the cricket community” — about the role of ACA adviser Greg Combet in portraying cricket as “an industrial relations battleground”. READ MORE A thaw in cricket war Well, heaven forfend that one should perceive a collective bargaining agreement as having anything to do with industrial relations. But to quote Peever: “The suggestion that CA’s push to modify the player payments model has nothing to do with genuine issues facing the game is an insult to everyone involved at CA, including other members of the board. It is also an insult to all those from across the state and territory associations who understand and support the need for change.” Goodness me — everyone’s so insulted. But this is the vigorous threshing of a straw man. Precisely nobody says the dispute has “nothing to do with genuine issues facing the game”; they merely sniff the unmistakeable bouquet of bullshit when CA insists that this is all the dispute is about. “I recognise the place of collective bargaining,” Peever continues proleptically, “and I accept the industrial relations framework in Australia.” Yet this is a bit like saying that he recognises the place of the speed limit and accepts the custom of driving on the left-hand side of the road. All anyone worth listening to in this debate has argued — as my colleague Peter Lalor did recently — is that the relationship of the professional athlete to modern sport makes a problematic fit with the conventional relationship of employee to employer because the athlete represents both producer and product. It’s a simple enough idea. CA has acquiesced in it for 20 years by paying cricketers out of a share of revenue. Those cricketers are entitled to ask what has changed, especially when they see athletes in other competitions, rightly or wrongly, agitating for similar status. In one respect, I’m inclined to agree with Peever. His merely having worked for Rio Tinto should not make of CA a “union basher”. But what CA is doing is behaving as a monopoly. And of monopolies a wariness is always justified, especially when they assert their market power, as CA has in escalating this dispute. Not that you’d guess this from the victimhood that oozes from Peever’s screed. By his account, CA has always respected the ACA; it has been “very generous”; it has endured a campaign against it of “sustained ferocity” waged by others with a “reckless strategy”. Yet an express principle of CA’s proposal, unchanged from the very beginning, was that it cease to provide funding for the ACA — a hitherto uncontroversial convention, in recognition of the union covering 100 per cent of Australia’s male and female international and domestic cricketers. What could have been more adversarial? As for CA’s generosity, its proposed package, stripped of payroll tax, rolled-over adjustment ledger and pie-eyed prizemoney projections then stretched across a greater number of players reflecting the inclusion of women, actually looks a bit parsimonious. Finally, who did what to whom? For even if one accepted every other aspect of Peever’s position — and of his commitment to grassroots cricket I would never doubt his sincerity — it is CA that has kept turning up the dial in this dispute. It is CA that attempted to turn the top international cricketers against the rest by seeking to buy the former off with turbocharged rewards. It is CA that has tried to turn female cricketers against male, with, among other things, an attempt last week to make a big deal out of the last adjustment ledger that was lamer than a three-legged dog. It is CA that has sought to turn grassroots cricket against elite cricketers — an entirely bizarre gambit when the success of both are so strongly linked. And in the end it was CA that walked away from the cricketers, not the other way around, that terminated their relations with extreme prejudice, that isn’t paying them now, that won’t backpay them ever, that opposes them pursuing their livelihoods anywhere else. In instituting the lockup, CA also caused the players’ intellectual property to revert to the ACA. Yet Peever now criticises the ACA for its decision to “lock up player IP into its own business ventures”. Precisely what was the ACA meant to do? Put it in the fridge? To surrender something so valuable was the very definition of a “reckless strategy”. And CA’s commercial and broadcasting partners will, one imagines, be letting it know. In the meantime, players have demonstrated their good faith by continuing to train, keeping their own counsel, and hoping for resolution, while CA have gone on blaming everyone but themselves. And while the message of Peever’s communique yesterday may have strained for the odd conciliatory sentiment, the medium tells otherwise — that CA remains no closer to understanding how clumsily it has gone about its work. -
@Hooroo said in Aussie Cricket:
@barbarian gee I hope this sorts itself out quickly. If the Ashes are cancelled I will be gutted.
I would love to know how much the Ashes are worth to CA. Surely that in itself would be enough to try and get things moving?
With IPL and the like, CA have minimal leverage here, and might do well to work that out sooner rather than later. Top cricketers are worth coin elsewhere, and if CA are going to be difficult, there is not a lot of incentive to hang around Australia.
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Veteran ABC commentator Drew Morphett has passed away.
One of the voices of ABC Cricket.
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LOL we're getting fucking dismantled by Bangladesh in Dhaka. Some particularly stupid shot selections have not helped us, along with Wade failing to review with 2 reviews left and the replay showing he was safe. Fucking hell.
Bangles lead by 104 with 8 wickets in hand. Australia to bat last, probably some time late today (Day 3) or early tomorrow
