Peever's Rant Again Highlights Cricket Australia's God Complex

If you weren’t wondering about it before now, you can start immediately.

What the hell is Cricket Australia playing at?

We are now fourteen days in to a period where all of Australia’s cricketers – male and female – are no longer being paid. The current Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which expired on June 30, had been in place for five years. For twenty years, since the players formed their collective Australian Cricketers Association (ACA) and negotiated the first MoU, Australian cricket has enjoyed its most prosperous period both on the field and in terms of the money flowing into the game. Any independent observer could only come to the conclusion that this agreement was a success, and having observed this would conclude that there would be little need to change the setup of the agreement. Sure, there could be tweaks one way or another in order to help certain areas, but the agreement in itself should surely be kept given the success it had achieved.

The board of Cricket Australia disagrees.

The differences and general differences have been well documented – I made my own thoughts on that here - http://westkiama.blogspot.com.au/2017/06/cricket-australia-stand-off-reaches.html

Last week the ACA announced that the players had decided against touring South Africa as part of an A Tour as there was no MoU in place. Furthermore, they announced that no players would be available for any tour until an MoU was negotiated. Cricket Australia (CA) noted its disappointment that the players would not agree to tour, considering the negotiations that had been occurring behind closed doors since June 30. CA suggested that with the ‘progress’ that had been made, the players should have agreed to tour. Of course, there was no mention of what progress had been made further to the same stumbling blocks that had been in place since this whole business began. In essence, CA expected the players to blink, and still they refused.

In the past week, discussions between the two parties have supposedly continued out of the public glare. No mention of progress has occurred, but both sides are aware of the need to come to a somewhat satisfactory conclusion as soon as possible, in order to allow the upcoming tours of Bangladesh and India to go ahead. With no bantering going on in the media, cricket lovers were hopeful progress was being made.

So what possible purpose could be served with the article released yesterday in the Australian newspaper by CA chairman David Peever, except to again antagonise the due process of negotiations? What did he hope to achieve? Its publication only served to throw petrol back on the fire that had hopefully begun to die down.

http://www.cricketaustralia.com.au/media/feature-stories/david-peever-memorandum-of-understanding/2017-07-13

Anything I could say here has already been said better by Gideon Haigh in his column in the same newspaper. 

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/opinion/gideon-haigh/medium-is-the-message-for-cricket-australia-chairman-david-peever/news-story/9c1c1eb0c258af1ba392963d95d46062

The best points from Haigh are as follows:

"As for CA’s generosity, its proposed package, stripped of payroll tax, rolled-over adjustment ledger and pie-eyed prizemoney projections then stretched across a greater number of players reflecting the inclusion of women, actually looks a bit parsimonious.

Finally, who did what to whom? For even if one accepted every other aspect of Peever’s position — and of his commitment to grassroots cricket I would never doubt his sincerity — it is CA that has kept turning up the dial in this dispute. It is CA that attempted to turn the top international cricketers against the rest by seeking to buy the former off with turbocharged rewards.

It is CA that has tried to turn female cricketers against male, with, among other things, an attempt last week to make a big deal out of the last adjustment ledger that was lamer than a three-­legged dog.

It is CA that has sought to turn grassroots cricket against elite cricketers — an entirely bizarre gambit when the success of both are so strongly linked.

And in the end it was CA that walked away from the cricketers, not the other way around, that terminated their relations with extreme prejudice, that isn’t paying them now, that won’t backpay them ever, that opposes them pursuing their livelihoods anywhere else.

In instituting the lockup, CA also caused the players’ intellectual property to revert to the ACA. Yet Peever now criticises the ACA for its decision to “lock up player IP into its own business ventures”. Precisely what was the ACA meant to do? Put it in the fridge?

To surrender something so valuable was the very definition of a “reckless strategy”. And CA’s commercial and broadcasting partners will, one imagines, be letting it know."

CA belligerent approach is obviously working towards one goal - that the players will not allow this to continue much longer because a) they need to earn money and b) they want to play cricket, especially with big series coming up. This is their fallback position, that the public will turn on the players, that the players will cave and CA will get what it wants. 

Once again, it would appear that they have misjudged the situation completely.