2LT Local News

James Sutherland, Alistair Nicholson in marathon meeting

Jul 13, 2017

However the increasingly febrile commercial atmosphere around the game is creating pressure for CA, as sponsors ask for explanations and the board’s commercial teams ask how to go about their usual jobs in this gridlock. At absolute maximum both commercial partners and relevant CA staff are thought to have only about another four to six weeks before it is too late for new sponsors to commit to summer deals, though other areas will bite sooner than that.

For one, even though CA would be saving money from not paying players or sending the Australia A squad to South Africa, a significant portion of the board’s staff are being left with little to do, opening questions about whether working hours are rolled back in the interim, or extra holidays taken. This abnormality in turn leads to questions being asked by staffers of managers, managers of executives and executives of Sutherland.

At the same time, the ACA’s negotiators and the players themselves are aware that an extended dispute will only serve to shrink the overall revenue created by cricket in Australia, scaring off sponsors, drawing decreasing fees for those who remain and also reducing broadcast rights and gate revenues as angry fans either switch the channel or fail to turn up to matches.

While ultimately it will be CA’s job as the governing body to clean up most of the mess, the players will feel the sting of reduced pay packets and also the invective delivered to them by spectators – much as Major League baseballers did at the end of the 1994-95 lockout that forced the cancellation of the World Series.

Sutherland’s meeting with Nicholson came on the same day that the longtime CA board director Mark Taylor addressed nervous commercial partners about the current storm. In doing so he effectively stated that there was far too much at risk for the battle to go on much longer, whatever either party had hoped to gain out of it at the beginning.

Another voice calling for cooler heads to prevail this week was Sutherland’s former lieutenant Michael Brown, who worked alongside him at CA for a decade from 2002. “It surprises me that the relationship has been allowed to get to the level it has,” Brown told the radio station 3AW. “We spent a lot of time during my tenure making sure players were part of the game and we respected players.

“We lived with the arguments about payments and what was fair and reasonable… their share of revenue was always important. It seems now that both parties have come to a stumbling block, and my best advice is leave your egos at the door, sit down quietly, away from the media spotlight, and find a resolution because this is not good for the game.

“While the Ashes is important, the biggest driver of our revenues is our Indian tours, and we saw with Monkeygate back in 2008 the damage that [trouble with] India can do, not only to bilateral relations but to world cricket itself. We are one of the three strong teams in world cricket, and we need to maintain leadership on both [board’s and players’] sides.”