Internet Desk: Former Australia skipper Michael Clarke said the board and cricketers should extend their earlier agreement for 12 months and try to find a solution of a bitter pay dispute.
After the end of the deadline, the Aussie cricketers threatened to snub the ‘A’ team tour of Proteas later in July unless they sign a new agreement with Cricket Australia.
“What needs to happen is keep the current MoU for the next 12 months and allow the players to get back to what they do best,” Clarke told reporters at Nine Network’s marketing launch for the Ashes.
“Cricket Australia, the ACA (Australian Cricketers’ Association), please go behind closed doors and sort this in private.
“The players want to play… let’s allow them to play while this stuff gets sorted out in the background.”
At the heart of the acrimonious dispute is Cricket Australia’s (CA) 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.
“I don’t want the Australian players to be unprepared because they have been concentrating on something else; give them 12 months and let them concentrate on the cricket,” Clarke said. “I don’t want to see any cricket missed.
“There will be a compromise. The ACA and Cricket Australia will find a way to make this work.”