Kevin from Marketing was always doomed

Dumped CEO of Cricket Australia Kevin Roberts lacked the credibility to make the case for cost cutting in the game Picture: AFP

Many a chief executive has been fired after bad financial results. Kevin Roberts has been axed for the opposite reason: his weren’t bad enough. These are topsy-turvy times. But there’s a depressing sense of a crisis that could only have befallen cricket.

Announcing the long-awaited departure yesterday, Cricket Australia chairman Earl Eddings began by commenting that Roberts had taken over as CEO 19 months ago “in difficult circumstances.” This is nonsense.

In coming into his role, Roberts enjoyed every conceivable advantage, predecessor James Sutherland having left the keys in the ignition of a plush and well-appointed vehicle.

CA had just seen through a pay deal with the players, a broadcast deal with Seven and Foxtel, survived the fallout from Sandpapergate to introduce a new captain and coach, and had India on the way to replenish its coffers.

Granted, CA had just been the subject of a detailed external review critical of its organisational culture. But this was an advantage too, at least potentially. Roberts had a guide to reform and a mandate for change — had he but chosen to take it.

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Roberts’ main obstacle was, unfortunately, himself. He was an embodiment of the problematic culture. He had been promoted from within on the last whim of an expiring chairman, David Peever, the board essentially giving him three years to improve a sketchy prior record: indeterminate participation in a restructuring, authorship of a debatable strategic plan, and implementation of a needless industrial relations confrontation.

It’s not just in hindsight that the appointment jarred, it having cost CA some hundreds of thousands in fees to Egon Zehnder to end up sticking a finger in the internal phone directory.

To put it simply, an organisation allegedly seeking to make a clean break with the past went straight back to it. Roberts was best known by a video during the pay dispute as cringe-worthy as your dad learning to rap.

One was prepared to give him a chance, to judge him by his professed intentions, but Roberts never inspired confidence.

For all his evident relish for the role, the CEO tended to come across as Kevin from Marketing. He talked a lot, said not much. He sweated small stuff, was prone to cloying gestures. He was a smoother of problems rather than a solver, which sometimes made them worse.

As sport came to terms with COVID-19, Roberts abruptly swapped his self-consciously casual open neck shirt for a green and gold hair shirt, advocating sweeping austerities on the basis that cricket was set to “run out of cash”.

There remains a respectable case for a reset of cricket’s cost base. But Roberts had too little credibility, with the players, with his staff, with the key states and with the media, to make it. Indeed, he bears some responsibility for previous inattention to expenses.

The campaign, such as it can be described, was then a mess. Roberts’ attempt to go direct to senior players, around the Australian Cricketers’ Association, was a strategy doomed to fail and bound to antagonise.

Continuing to draw four-fifths of his pay after mandatorily furloughing four-fifths of CA’s employees left him in no position to argue for equality of sacrifice.

Peddling pessimism while other sports threw themselves into rescuing their seasons made him sound perversely addicted to worst-case scenarios, while Roberts failed to allay suspicions that his motives were opportunistic.

In particular, CA stalled and prevaricated around their financial projections, emphatic where they should have been circumspect and vice versa. Nobody was able to make the sums add up, which led stakeholders to conclude that either they didn’t, or that those concerned couldn’t or wouldn’t make them. It got to the point that if CA told you the time, you’d want it independently verified.

CA was finally reduced to arguing that, well, if the savings were made but then proved to have been unnecessary, it was all to the good – down the track the game would enjoy a Frydenbergesque windfall. Never mind the damage done and the competence lost in the meantime. The effect of the 150 jobs cricket has shed this winter, with more apparently to follow on Wednesday, will be felt at every level of the game.

By the end, Roberts had lost everyone, his board being seemingly the last to realise. And that’s an ongoing problem.

Nobody is quite sure what Roberts’ departure means to his inner circle: chief operating officer Scott Grant, acting chief financial officer Paul Reining, legal chief Christine Harman, and public affairs chief Karina Keisler. The choice of Nick Hockley as an interim CEO does not suggest deep reserves of confidence in what remains.

Most of all, however, there are those directors, who, frankly, have escaped pretty lightly given CA’s organisational misadventures in the past three years. Eddings described the appointment of the CEO as the board’s “most important role” – which means, therefore, they have flunked it.

It’s far from clear what some members of this board are adding; the previous few months have even raised questions about the model of an independent board of non-executive directors being paid honoraria, which seems increasingly removed both from cricket’s quotidian reality and its strategic needs.

Last week, ironically, James Sutherland bobbed up, newly dressed down, in his role as the inaugural chairman of the Live Entertainment Industry Forum. He allowed himself one passing comment about the organisation he left 18 ago: “Let’s just put it this way: it’s a good time not to be a cricket administrator.” Maybe. But that’s no reason to make it harder than it needs to be.