Cricket Australia chief says players will receive a 15% increase under the governing body’s new model and ‘there aren’t many people in Australia’ getting that

James Sutherland has taken the gloves off in Cricket Australia’s battle over pay, accusing the players of rejecting an offer well above what most workers could expect.

“In some quarters we’re being perceived as being hard or unfair on the players in this situation,” he said.

“But it’s important to note that we have a player payment pool in this current year of $79m, and our proposal for next year is for a player payment pool of $91m,” CA’s chief executive told Guardian Australia. “That’s a 15% increase. There aren’t many people in Australia getting an increase like that, or have an offer like that on the table.”

Players reject Cricket Australia pay offer as dispute rumbles on Read more

Sutherland said the governing body had been forced into the open to redress “certain things put into the public domain that needed to be discredited or at least corrected”.

“To that end we couldn’t sit on our hands and stick to the philosophy that negotiation should happen behind closed doors.”



With the current revenue-sharing agreement due to expire on 30 June, Sutherland said the public needed to hear Cricket Australia’s position more clearly.



“There are facts that need to be put forward and the public needs to better understand our side of things when they’re being represented in an alternative way,” he said. “We needed to take our hands out from under our legs.”

Until now, CA’s position has landed in the public domain largely via back channels, leaked emails and opposition reaction, leaving the organisation open to criticism. Now Sutherland has tried to colour-in the rationale behind the proposed change to the model of player pay.

Chief among CA’s reasoning has been a public pledge to invest further in grassroots cricket, an area where the players also claim their proposal would increase funding.

Nine, Ten, Foxtel or Optus? Australian cricket TV rights explained Read more

“We understand that 71% of what we spend our money on basically relates to elite and high performance cricket,” Sutherland said. “Another 17% relates to what we call running the game. Just 12% goes to grassroots cricket. We need to find ways to increase that. It’s not enough. We’ve identified that through a lot of reviews we’ve done leading into this new strategic planning cycle.”

Under the Australian Cricketers’ Association model, 22.5% of funds would be dedicated to grassroots cricket – a projected total of $119m, which over five years would become a $595m grassroots seed fund.

Sutherland said the players’ association was working without sufficient information to make a detailed proposal.

“They’re talking about a model that looks at it in an alternative way from a gross revenue perspective,” he said. “While the ACA has addressed [grassroots cricket funding] to some extent, they don’t know anywhere near the detail we do in terms of what is involved in managing these issues both at an operational level and at a strategic and policy level.”

It’s optimistic to suggest the claims and counter-claims might result in a bidding war to local cricket’s benefit.

After decades of acknowledged underinvestment in the grassroots game, some may be forgiven for questioning whether the timing of these public pledges seems a little convenient. It’s probably an optimistic read to suggest that the claims and counter-claims might result in a bidding war to local cricket’s benefit. Sutherland, for his part, was adamant that things would improve under the CA plan.

“I doubt we would have spent a couple hundred thousand dollars, or more probably, doing our facilities audit if we weren’t genuinely serious about trying to understand where the deficiencies are and what we need to do about them,” he said.

“This is not ad hoc, or about us putting our finger in the air. There is a level of sophistication to this that shows we’re not just flying kites.”

As the stalemate deepens, and the now-public trench warfare coarsens, Sutherland did offer something approaching a hint of understanding for the players’ position,

“I understand that this is change and that this is different,” he said. “Change is difficult. People are used to the model and feel like they’re losing ground. Status is not a bad word for it actually. I understand that there’s an element of this that’s about preserving the status and tradition of Sheffield Shield, for example, in the whole makeup of Australian cricket.”

With that slight hint of conciliation, there may yet be hope for some agreement.