Why Australian captain Steve Smith must lead from front to put an end to Cricket Australia pay dispute

HEARD the one about the out-of-work multi-millionaire who lined up for the dole? Steve Smith and his players need to stand up and be counted for the sake of the game, writes Ashley Mallett

Australian captain Steve Smith, far right, leads Australia to victory at the SCG.

HEARD the one about the out-of-work multi-millionaire who lined up for the dole?

This ludicrous pay dispute smacks of a similar trait. The fly in the ointment here is our out-of-contract multi-millionaire cricketers are way past the assets threshold to attract such a handout. However, their asking for a better pay deal through the Australian Cricketers’ Association (ACA) smacks of greed beyond the pale.

When is too much money never enough?

Cricket Australia rightly believes that there is too little money of the giant income purse being put back into grassroots cricket. Because of the crammed international program, our Test men rarely play Sheffield Shield cricket and our Shield men hardly ever turn up for a grade match. The huge drop in standard at Shield and club level was the main reason a cricket academy was established in Adelaide way back in the late 1980s.

Nowadays our top and emerging men and women cricketers train at the amazing $28 million National Cricket Centre (NCC) in Brisbane. A few seasoned Sheffield Shield players, some unlikely to play international cricket, are paid, I am told, in excess of $200,000 a season.

Others of a lesser ilk have contracts worth more than $120,000 a year. The public doesn’t watch Shield cricket any more.

Shane Watson arrives at the Australian Cricketrers’ Association meeting over the pay dispute on Sunday.

Why? Because the public isn’t fooled.

The overall standard is simply not good enough. Go to a game anywhere in Australia and you join the players’ family members, a gaggle of collector tragics seeking an autograph or two and the familiar man and his dog lounging on a grassy knoll in the outer. Shield cricket is, as one prominent players put it a few years back, “grade cricket in drag”.

Sadly Shield cricket has almost become “surplus to requirements”. It runs at a huge loss every season and more and more the players brought onto the international stage are found in the Big Bash and fast-tracked through the Under-19s and Australia A tours.

Rightly or wrongly Cricket Australia further erodes the importance of Shield cricket by fragmenting the matches to allow wham-bam excitement of the Big Bash which attracts the crowds over the school holidays, and brings in truckloads of money. The players are not looking good in this pay dispute.

Steve Smith and his senior players should stand up and be counted. Smith and co would come out smelling roses with the public and the media at large if they sensibly agreed to pocket only the odd million dollar or two per season.

Surely our senior players have the clout to convince the ACA to come to their senses on the players’ behalf, for the game cannot afford this stand-off.

This dispute is worse, far worse, than in 1977 when Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket hit the game with all the subtlety of a giant sledgehammer.

Then the players had a genuine beef over the money they were being paid. Today there is no argument.

Greed stands out like a sore thumb. There was a time in cricket circles when a selfish cricketer was called a “Jack man”.

If he can win back the fans with genuine leadership, overnight Steve Smith would go from a “Jack” to a King.

Originally published as Why Australian captain Steve Smith must lead from front to put an end to Cricket Australia pay dispute