Internet Desk: Australian cricketers will not participate in ‘A’ team tour of Proteas later this July until Cricket Australia offers a new deal to them, confirmed the Australian Cricketers’ Association (ACA) said today.
After an emergency meeting of players in a Sydney hotel today, the cricketers have decided that those who will be selected for Australia ‘A’ tour of South Africa would come to Brisbane tomorrow but they will travel in only one condition only after a new MOU is agreed.
The previous MOU was expired on Friday and after that almost 230 Australian top cricketers have faced unemployment.
“They don’t intend to tour but the reality is they don’t fly out of the country until Friday,” ACA chief executive Alistair Nicholson told a news conference after the meeting.
“So the players are going to go into camp as planned and hopefully we can make some progress with regards to the MOU. There would need to be a significant breakthrough on the key issue of the revenue sharing model.”
At the heart of the acrimonious dispute is Cricket Australia’s insistence that the two-decade-old model, under which players get a fixed percentage of revenue, should be jettisoned.
CA believes the revenue-share model is unfit for modern times and is starving grass-roots cricket of funding, while players say it has underpinned the game’s growth and prosperity over the past 20 years.