Echoes of Hanrahan in CA’s doomsday prophecy that is thin on details

The current crop of players, including Steve Smith, is the best thing Cricket Australia has going for it. Picture: AAP

Some older readers might be familiar with the Australian bush poem, Said Hanrahan, written a century ago by Patrick Hartigan, and popular in the generation where every schoolchild could recite The Geebung Polo Club and knew How MacDougall Topped the Score.

“ ‘We’ll all be rooned’, said Hanrahan in accents most forlorn, outside the church, ere Mass began one frosty Sunday morn,” it ­begins.

“The congregation stood about, coat-collars to the ears, and talked of stock, and crops, and drought, as it had done for years.”

In the ensuing chorus of lamentation, each parishioner competes to offer a more apocalyptic vision of the future than the last, reinforced in every stanza by Hanrahan incanting his favourite phrase: “We’ll all be rooned.”

Since the irruption of COVID-19, the spirit of Hanrahan has been abroad at Jolimont, Cricket Australia pouring out non-specific messages of depression and despair to explain specific measures like the furloughing of the bulk of its staff and the insistence on deep cuts in the grants to state associations.

The public campaign started about seven weeks ago, with a detailed newspaper story describing how cricket was in danger of “going broke” without a “major financial overhaul”.

It reported a “$20 million reduction in Cricket Australia’s cash and investment reserves”, and a number of tour cancellations that had “saved CA about $20 million”. This meant, it was confidently reported, that “the pandemic has stripped in the order of $40 million from CA’s accounts.”

But hang on. Wouldn’t a “reduction” and a “saving” of the same amount have cancelled each other out?

Alas, this was not the last confusing and contradictory advice from CA, contributing, quite needlessly, to an environment of distrust and worsening antagonism between headquarters, the players, the states and cricket’s people generally.

Last week, after a month, then a week, of further delay, was to be the big reveal of forecasts of Australian Cricket Revenue, from which the players, under the auspices of CA’s memorandum of understanding with the Australian Cricketers’ Association, derive their 27.5 per cent share.

It lobbed Thursday. But where one might have expected, given present uncertainties, perhaps a range of scenarios, a breakdown of costs and an identification of savings, there was for 2020-21 just a figure: $239.7 million.

This represented a reduction on April’s pre-COVID forecast of 48 per cent — as though someone thought just halving it might look a bit arbitrary and snipped off an extra 2 per cent for the sake of a spurious sense of precision. CA’s accounts are notoriously opaque, but were an ASX company to issue such a statement, it would be suspended at once. To concerned parties it was as near to useless as sending out No 11 as a nightwatchman to protect No 10.

Two points can here be granted. All sport is facing a long-term readjustment as recession exposes the vulnerability of its pre-existing financial model, where income always grows and expenditure rises to meet it.

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The environment, too, is dynamic and uncertain, with the Board of Control for Cricket in India making its usual gestures of goodwill and amity around the Indian Premier League.

But this, rather, is the point. Nothing as yet has happened, except that CA has saved money from the cancellation of unprofitable fixtures and from the standing down of staff.

Next week, it seems, redundancies will commence at Jolimont, presumably freeing further funds.

Yet so far as anyone knows, India’s summer tour is an overwhelming likelihood.

Gate revenue will be impaired, but the net impact, once its cost of collection is discounted, may not be great. The game’s broadcasters remain on the hook to make their next contract payments because there has been no significant change to their expected amount of content.

So what gives? CA first talked about lowering cricket’s cost base after the last MOU negotiations, but then rather failed to deliver. Suspicion lingers that CA seized on COVID as a stalking horse for change. Whatever the case, CA has continued peddling a crisis narrative well into the period when it should ideally be buoying stakeholders and fans about the summer to come, which for cricket actually holds great promise.

The perversity of Jolimont’s position is that it now seems to depend on Seven and Foxtel demanding swingeing cuts to their rights fees in order to justify the direness of CA’s forebodings.

Last week the spin was, hey, no matter if we’re grossly over-estimating the financial impact. If we’re wrong, we’ll get it back later, right?

Not much solace for those people and programs sacrificed in the meantime.

Not much consideration of the damage cricket is doing itself right now.

Cricket is the sum of its relationships. Two years ago, CA was concerned enough about its culture to submit to a review by an external consultant. It feels like nothing has been learned.

The Australian Cricket Council, which was designed to draw CA, the ACA and state associations closer, has met precisely once, nine months ago.

For once, the players are influential in rather than central to this dispute. Rather are they being compelled to exercise oversight over the CA executive that the aloof and increasingly ineffectual CA board seems incapable of doing.

That probably won’t stop them, or at least the ACA, being criticised along the usual lines for living in nice houses and driving expensive cars.

That will be foolish. Frankly, this generation of players are the best thing the game has going for it at present.

Yet this nonsense seems to have a way to run — regrettably so, because the outcome of pessimism is self-reinforcing, and one reaches the point where it grows ripe for mockery.

Those who know Hartigan’s poem will remember how it ends, with the drought breaking copiously but the habit of lifetimes unaltered: “And every creek a banker ran, and dams filled overtop; ‘We’ll all be rooned,’ said Hanrahan, ‘If this rain doesn’t stop’.”