Illustration: Simon Letch A compromised Ashes series remains at the outer end of probability, but with the June 30 deadline for a deal between Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers' Association passing, the stalemate would enter a new realm. Much more stale, much less mate. The players are solid, which is helped by the fact that nobody is going to be in the dole queue on Monday. No state or Test cricketers are going to need, as the likes of Dennis Lillee did in the early 1970s and all cricketers did for half of the twentieth century, their schoolteacher wives to become the principal breadwinners. But with July upon us, the clock is now ticking loudly and with increasing speed. It is time to disentangle the threads of what we think should happen from what we think will happen. Personally, I am sympathetic to the players' cause, which is not about enriching a few but carving out a viable career for a few dozen. In my view, they are not being greedy, and the refusal of the Test-playing elite to be bought off or otherwise split from their rank and file is to be admired. The revenue-sharing model has brought industrial peace and increased fairness to the top level for 20 years, and it has not impoverished the broader game. Cricket Australia may warn that this model will not be sustainable into the future, but, coming from a peak organisation bristling with full-time staff, consultants and employees who refer to themselves by their initials – just like a real big-time corporation and the AFL do! – the warnings of a dire future, the kiddies fleeced by mercenary millionaires, sound much more like ideology than candour. As I have written here before, CA's approach indicates a will to overstate player power in order to break it. That said, whatever anybody thinks ought to happen is irrelevant. Whether CA's approach is motivated by finance or ideology; whether or not the administrators are making us 'the laughing stock of the world', as Alan Jones declared in one of his worryingly frequent forays into sanity (and on that, since when do white male demagogues become more sensible as they grow older? What gives, Alan?); whether CA has behaved reprehensibly or intentionally in sabotaging its own negotiation process; all of this makes it more rather than less likely that CA will be the side to blink last.

Past behaviour is the best guide to future action. It's often forgotten about the World Series Cricket era that the 'rebel' Australian players wanted to keep representing their country in traditional Test and Sheffield Shield cricket, but were banned by the then Australian Cricket Board, which preferred to send out a third-rate national team rather than compromising with the WSC signatories. In the players' initial hopes, World Series Cricket was to run parallel to traditional cricket. It was the board that stopped that happening and turned the players into outlaws. But WSC is not the most relevant precedent. In 1977, Australia's best cricketers were receiving little more than the average wage, often less. They were amateurs, representing their country for honour and glory, and as board secretary Alan Barnes infamously warned them, tens of thousands of Australians were willing to swap places with them. Today's male Test cricketers are wealthy young people with a stake in the game's success and the status of partners with the administrators. This reflects the game in 1912, when the players owned and ran cricket's principal cash cow, Ashes tours to England. They shared some of that revenue with administrators, who trickled their revenue down to the grassroots. The stakes are higher now but the basic elements are the same: administrators trying to break the solidarity of Test players who, before 1912, earned enough from a single Ashes tour to buy three houses in Rose Bay (think about that in today's dollars). Then, as now, the players and the board had to share the wealth. When it came down to control, the clashes were vivid and rustic. The board inserted a 'plant' into the Australian team and selection panel, in the form of Victorian lickspittle Peter McAlister, who duly received a bloody nose from Test captain Clem Hill. The Board of Control insisted on taking ownership of the upcoming 1912 Ashes tour, and the players insisted on retaining it. The leading players of the day – the 'Big Six' of Hill, Victor Trumper, Warwick Armstrong, Tibby Cotter, Sammy Carter and Vernon Ransford – said to the board, you can either yield or send a Test team to England without us, and it will be an embarrassment.

The Test team went to England without them and was an embarrassment. But the board won control, which it clung to for the best part of a century, and now that it has relinquished it a little, it wants that control back. Google 'Cricket Big Six' now and you will get a clip of Chris Lynn. Cricket Australia is no longer called the 'Board of Control'. But William Faulkner's chestnut – 'The past is never dead, it's not even past' – is very true about this old game. Control lies deep in the board's DNA, and if you think they've been irrationally stubborn so far, you ain't seen nothing yet. Loading My belief is that the ACA, on the main principle, is in the right. My prediction is that the ACA will be forced to back down. As in any family breakdown, the fight will not be won on reasoning or persuasion or logic, but on pure bloody-mindedness. In the meantime, as it's only July, the poor Australian cricket public can hope for the best and take some solace in being envied by the Australian rugby public. With the Bledisloe Cup approaching even faster than the cricket season, there are rugby fans who would do anything to avoid having a Wallabies team trot out to certain annihilation next month. A player strike, causing the cancellation of the series against the All Blacks? What a great escape. As Louise said to Thelma, we're not in the middle of nowhere, but we can see it from here.