Channel 7 nitpicking on cricket schedule ignores large gorilla in the room

The network’s complaints look like an attempted shakedown driven by a cash-strapped, debt-dogged buyer’s remorse.

India's captain Virat Kohli could not careless as to when Channel 9 screen The Block Picture: Phil Hillyard

Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit, runs the old joke. The answer, of course, is: anywhere it likes.

Which brings us to the Board of Control for Cricket in India, bulking large in Seven West Media’s Federal Court action against Cricket Australia, reported on Tuesday to have ‘sent shockwaves’ through cricket with its ‘extraordinary claims.’

Yet the content of the affidavit of Lewis Martin, Seven’s head of sport, is almost entirely unsurprising.

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In short, CA tried to streamline the quarantine obligations for India’s cricketers by bringing forward the summer’s international white-ball quotient.

There actually existed a rationale for such a schedule change even without the requirements of COVID safety. The custom of white ball after red ball is a vestige of the days when PBL Marketing ruled the roost.

Early indications, in fact, are that the public have embraced the idea of pushing Tests deeper into the summer.

A proportion of traditional cricket followers have tended to tune the game out after the Sydney Test; this summer they won’t, with some potential spin-offs for the Big Bash League. Appetite grows with the eating.

But of course CA put out the best possible welcome mat for the BCCI. Team India’s looming schedule is gruelling. Amazingly, when Seven faces competition from The Block on Nine it does not loom large in Virat Kohli’s calculations.

Martin’s boss James Warburton has jeered that CA is ‘absolutely terrified’ of the BCCI, his implication is that this is somehow irrational.

Yet if CA did not harbour a wholesome circumspection about the BCCI, it would hardly be doing its job: their bilateral relationship is comfortably Jolimont’s biggest asset, while the BCCI is many times CA’s size.

CA got the memo back in January 2008, when the BCCI toyed with flouncing out of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy after Monkeygate.

Since then, the BCCI’s gorrilatude, and its confident awareness of same, has only grown. You can cavil all you please about this, but it just is. Cricket’s Pax Anglo-Australiana is long, long ago.

Seven’s complaints now suggest that they barely understood what they were buying in March 2018, when they foreshadowed spending $450 million on a non-exclusive deal to broadcast Test matches and Big Bash League fixtures over the next five years.

To be fair, the broadcast rights for cricket are sui generis. They have many moving parts: obligations to bilateral partners; to the International Cricket Council and its multiple, overlapping competitions; to state associations and their domestic competitions; to player trade unions, and cricketers generally; to sponsors and venue providers.

But it now looks like Seven treated cricket as equivalent to any local sporting property, infinitely amenable to television’s priorities.

One recalls the media conference where Warburton’s predecessor Tim Worner spoke excitedly not of cricket but of the commercial breaks – the ‘most valuable 30 seconds in Australian marketing.’

“We don’t go into these things without a plan,” said Worner. “And we have a plan to monetise the sport.” The Baldrick of broadcasting.

It’s this kind of narrowness that lends Martin’s affidavit such a boorish edge, not least in his dissing of Tasmania as a starting point for the Big Bash League.

Martin says that an ‘informed inference’ from his ‘general knowledge of organisation of sports events’ is that CA ‘could have entered into contracts with the Government of Tasmania in respect of Men’s BBL matches’ because such fixturing was “commercially irrational” otherwise.

Did Martin try to establish this for sure? Did he, bollocks. Anyway, Cricket Tasmania’s chairman Andrew Gaggin on Wednesday expanded Martin’s “general knowledge” in repudiating this “informed inference” by stating that “no financial incentive was provided by the Tasmanian Government to Cricket Australia for BBL matches to be played in Tasmania.”

Anyway, why the hell shouldn’t the BBL start in Tasmania, a long-time haven from COVID? The state is a full-fledged part of cricket’s federation that nonetheless regularly gets a raw fixturing deal. Take commercial rationality to its logical extreme and there’d be matches only in Sydney and Melbourne. Then see how long cricket lasted.

So it’s hard to see Seven’s complaint as anything other than an attempted shakedown driven by a cash-strapped, debt-dogged buyer’s remorse, hanging the consequences for cricket.

At CA, nonetheless, there should be seller’s remorse too. The parallel deals with Seven and Fox Sports were always sewn with the potential for tension, for the seeming favour of one partner over the other. Part of Seven’s chagrin now is that summer’s white ball front-ending suits its rival.

CA’s approach to the negotiation in 2017-18 set the tone for what has since unfolded. If your deal strategy is to squeeze counterparties for the last possible dollar, then it can be difficult to introduce non-financial factors into the subsequent relationship. Even a pandemic.

It’s ugly already. It’s going to get uglier. And it’s reminiscent of another old joke – the one about the bald men fighting over a comb.