On one level, Australian cricket has struck out into unchartered territory. As of 30 June, more than two-hundred of Australia’s top male and female cricketers have no contract with Cricket Australia – the governing body for professional and amateur cricket – due to its failure to resolve a pay dispute with the players. The heavy-handed tactics of Cricket Australia and the countervailing resolve of the Australian Cricketers’ Association have led to a stand-off with no end in sight.

But in another respect, this is an old, familiar story of the incommensurable interests of Capital and Labour. It is hardly coincidental that members of the board of Cricket Australia boast more experience in the world of corporate governance than they do in, what Gideon Haigh calls, ‘cricket’s unique mesh of overlapping stakeholders’. It is little wonder, then, that Cricket Australia has dealt with the players in much the same way a corporation might try to break an industrial dispute: erode solidarity, appeal to the self-interest of the significant few, wait for shrinking bank balances to force desperate negotiators back to the table.

For in effect, what the players are demanding is the continuation of a decades-long stake in the revenue accumulated by Cricket Australia, an arrangement in which they are ‘partners’ and not just ‘products’. Cricket Australia, on the other hand, are prepared substantially to increase the salaries of top-tier international cricketers, but at the cost of any ongoing revenue-sharing arrangement and without commensurable increases for domestic players.

What the players are seeking, in other words, is a form of mutualism, of power-sharing and a stake in corporate governance in the interests of cricket as a whole. But such an arrangement is predicated on mutual trust, the shared value of a tradition and the institutionalisation of accumulated good-will. Has that now become impossible due to the current dispute?