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Opinion
In March this year, Cricket Australia boss Kevin Roberts must have been a fairly happy man.
Australia’s first domestic summer with Steve Smith and Dave Warner back in the game was done and dusted. The Test side had gone from strength to strength following their Ashes heroics and the T20 side was playing some excellent cricket.
Granted, it had not been a great summer money wise. The horrendous bush fires, searing heat and a lack of quality opposition in the Tests meant the games held before Christmas were probably break even at best.
The second part of the summer was better, although the Black Caps playing some underwhelming Tests didn’t help the bottom line, but the women’s T20 World Cup was a huge success, leaving the sport in Australia in a pretty good place – or so you’d think.
The coronavirus pandemic has had an interesting impact on cricket and not for the better. There has been a lot of uncertainty about how Australia and the rest of world would manage each nation’s health issues, which then impacted on international cricket. The ICC has been struggling to decide whether international fixtures should go ahead, and if they do, whether people can watch games live and what precautions players will have to take.
All of this appears to have got to Kevin Roberts, who in the past month has done some very strange and scary things.
(Kelly Defina/Getty Images)
Cricket Australia reviewed its finances – not only its available funds, but what it thought it might earn in the next Australian summer. As a result of this, CA stood down 200 staff. There are serious question marks about how many will be returned to full employment.
In addition, Roberts and CA have insisted all states accept 25 per cent cuts to their grants, which has resulted in a further 100 jobs being lost, although not all states accepted these cuts. The concern with these cuts is the direct impact they will have on junior and regional cricket, which are cornerstones of maintaining and growing the sport in Australia.
Separate to these cuts, CA was asked by the players’ association to provide detailed accounts of current revenue and projected earnings. This is in line with the current workplace agreement, which involves a revenue-sharing arrangement.
Part of Kevin Roberts’ reply included phone calls to senior players warning them of serious revenue cuts as a result of a sharp decrease in the value of shares that CA owned. Roberts also apparently provided a short email with dire warnings about massive financial losses, but no detailed financial statement.
Fast forward to the past few days and Roberts is now sounding extremely optimistic. The India tour, in his words, is “a nine out of ten chance of going ahead”. The ICC has put a decision about the T20 World Cup on hold until next month, but there is still a possibility this event could go ahead.
Some of Roberts’ concerns were crowds or a lack of them. It now seems the football codes will be allowing some people back into grounds in the next week or two, which should mean healthy numbers should be able to watch both the World Cup and the India Test live, assuming they go ahead.
In other words, the panic that Roberts created about financial ruin appears to have disappeared, but the damage he has done is immense.
People in state cricket positions have lost their jobs, while the 200 CA staff won’t know if they have work until next month. In addition, he’s managed to lose the trust and confidence of the state associations as well as the players because neither have received the financial information they requested the best part of two months ago.
This could all have been avoided if Roberts had been capable of managing this crisis, but he’s shown himself to be lacking the skills to be able to do so effectively.
The comparison of his performance to that of Peter V’landys, chairman of the ARL Commission, couldn’t be more stark.
ARLC Chairman Peter V’landys. (Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)
When sport stopped in Australia as a result of the pandemic, rugby league was in a dire position. The NRL was effectively broke, there was huge pressure from the media and broadcasters, players had no idea when or if they were going to be paid and there was no clear path to fix these issues.
Nine weeks later, he’s managed to get the competition back up and running, has negotiated a new broadcast deal and is well on the way to having people back watching games live by the end of the month. He even found time to introduce some rule changes!
That he’s been able to do this with a national sport that’s in far worse financial shape than cricket speaks volumes about his ability as a top-class administrator. More to the point, it highlights some serious failings in Roberts, which must be clearly obvious to the CA board.
There are a number of issues that have to be addressed as a matter of urgency:
• Kevin Roberts needs to press state and federal governments over issues that are currently preventing cricket events from taking place, such as interstate and international travel, plus crowds at games.
• Once he has these issues sorted, a clear, accurate financial statement has to be issued to both the state associations and the players’ association as a matter of urgency.
• He needs to give certainty to employees currently out of work with CA about their job status as soon as possible.
• He and the board need to make sure any positions that are directly related to junior, women’s or country cricket, which have been withdrawn by the states as a result of his panic, are reinstated quickly, certainly within the next two or three weeks.
It’s a shame Roberts’ handling of recent events has been so poor because he’d done a pretty fair job getting Australian cricket back onto the right path after the issues involving Steve Smith and company two years ago.
Peter V’landys has shown what can be done to manage a sporting crisis. Perhaps if Kevin Roberts can’t quickly fix the issues he created, the CA board might want to see if V’landys has any spare time to run Australia’s favourite summer sport.
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