Robert Craddock: forgotten faces of cricket’s cash crisis

Fear not for the players in cricket’s latest pay war. They’ll be fine. It’s the foot soldiers far removed from the public’s eye that are harbouring growing discontent writes ROBERT CRADDOCK.

• Cricketers set to resist massive pay cuts
• Coronavirus curse has CA boss caught in crosshairs

Fear not for the players in cricket’s latest pay war. They’ll be fine. But further down the ladder there are bloody scars which may never heal.

The players have suddenly become the headline act in cricket’s proposed pay cuts but for once they are not the biggest hotspot in a story which has Cricket Australia chief executive Kevin Roberts fighting to avoid the “coronavirus chop’’ that fell upon Rugby Australia’s Raelene Castle and Todd Greenberg at the NRL.

Roberts, though under siege, may yet live to fight another day – but the pressure is mounting.

The bad news for him is that a large group of states are angry and bewildered that cricket was suddenly in danger of going broke by August.

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Under siege Cricket Australia CEO Kevin Roberts. Picture: Daniel Pockett/Getty

The better news for him is states don’t have the CA board pull they used to and the board signed off on the drastic cost-cutting measures.

No matter what happens to the players in their standoff with CA the unavoidable fact is that pay cuts are coming their way for once they agreed to become partners in the game they signed on for the bumps as well as the booms.

The size of the haircuts will be worked out and eventually they will simply get on with the job, remembering that when hundreds and thousands of Australians are out of work getting your income sliced from $1.3 million to $1 million is not the sporting equivalent of being sent to a soup kitchen.

Todd Greenberg walked away with dignity. Picture: Matt King/Getty

They are ready to take a cut as long as they (like the protesting states) see the financials, which is fair enough.

Further down the tree it’s the humble foot soldiers – hundreds of CA staff including coaches – who are nursing, relatively speaking, the deepest wounds which have, all at once, made them vulnerable, fearful and angry as they adjust to life in exile on just 20 per cent of their pay until the end of the financial year.

The temptations with cricket’s pay cuts is to lump them in with the savage pruning of the football codes but they are different stories because, unlike the footy codes which have lost a large slice of their season, cricket squeezed in all but the last few games of its summer and last month pocketed a $100 million broadcast payment.

Over the past 35 years I have seen CA staff react to rebel tours of South Africa, player deaths, ball tampering and match fixing scandals but never seen them so angry.

“We really trusted head office and the indication we got was that we would be OK,’’ one staffer said.

Raelene Castle’s exit won’t fix rugby’s problems. Picture: AP/Rick Rycroft

“All the feedback and meetings does not change the fact that people felt totally blindsided. We hear all this stuff from the bosses about CA putting people first. It’s all rubbish.

“I find it impossible to listen to and many others feel the same.

“And what is all this stuff about ‘we are all in it together’ when we take an 80 per cent pay cut and the executive take a 20 per cent cut?”

CA saved just $3 million for their pay cuts.

Had they saved 10 times as much it might have been worth it but after working so hard to instil confidence back into Australian cricket after the ball tampering scandal this is a major setback to the culture they so crave.

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GOOD: Todd Greenberg’s dignified farewell interview after being ousted as NRL boss. He was never Mr Perfect and his last few months in the job must have been excruciating but he left with a good grace lacking in some of the club officials who worked so tirelessly to undermine him.

BAD: Cricket’s cash crisis. No Australian sport which has more than $200 million in annual broadcasting revenue should ever be in danger in running out of money in four months – in an off-season.

UGLY: Rugby union’s vicious civil war. The exit of Raelene Castle is not the end of it but merely an escalation in the crisis which is threatening the professional future of the code.