Cricket Australia reportedly set to sack Kevin Roberts

So cricket now will ditch the laughably named 'high performance programs' and revert to the century old trusted method of finding players via performance against their peers. If you make runs or get wickets in grade cricket you go to state cricket and so forth. I predict Australia will have a super strong team again soon and a bunch of highly paid hangers on will be looking for a job elsewhere.

Agree re those points, though I suspect that Sutherland's influence may have been on the wane in his later years, as the hard heads gained numbers and influence. The pay deal had been pretty uncontentious from 1999 through several iterations and it was only when Roberts and Peever got the job of dealing with things that it turned toxic. To the extent that being told things like your job is to win contributed to the sandpaper culture Sutherland seems to have been a part of that. However, I also see bad behaviour of this type as being pretty endemic in Oz cricket (aluminium bats, kicking opposing batsmen in the bum, under-arm bowling, betting against your own side in a test match, vile verbal abuse and so on), just as I see match fixing and ball tampering being pretty well ingrained in Pakistan and, probably, Indian cricket. In fact ball tampering seems to be pretty endemic everywhere. The playing schedule and priorities have become very crowded and jumbled and I think you are right that Sutherland has to wear a fair part of that. As an article on the ABC website notes, important parts of the Argus report seem to have been neglected, or actions taken contrary to the recommendations. I am still itching to see the contest against India when it arrives. Love the game but it sometimes seems great despite the efforts of the administrators.

Kevin Roberts has done a remarkable thing in the past 3 or 4 months. He's managed to annoy the State Associations by insisting on the cuts to their grants, he's also manged to p*** off the Players Association by failing to deliver on his promise of a detailed breakdown of CA finances and he's finally p***ed off 200 of his own staff by insisting they take huge paycuts, all the while keeping 80% of his huge salary. I'm guessing it must take real skill to annoy so many people at one time.

I've only one criticism of this comment, Sinclair and that's around the role of Sutherland in the years before his leaving the top job. His handling of all things cricket in the 2 or 3 years before he got out, were nothing short of diabolical IMO. He allowed the toxic culture that lead to the sandpaper incident in SA to grow without check, he created a cricket schdeule that put both Shield and domestic ODI cricket on a distant backburner, but above all, he failed to properly manage both Peever & Roberts when they were destroying relations between the players and Cricket Australia. He certainly left the game in a pretty good financial position, but his legacy of mismanaging those vital issues from 2017 onwards, put a tarnish on a pretty good period of administration

Roberts and Peevey (ex-Rio Tinto) led CA's attack on the players in the last pay dispute, a dispute they basically created so they could try to bust the players' union and turn players into serfs. They have represented a management mentality that sees workers as drudges who are to be seen but not heard and they see wages as being a cost unrelated to productivity. They don't take the same view of their own salaries and benefits, however. If Roberts is punted, good riddance. Players generate the revenue, not administrators. Investment in the things that drive player excellence (and from that revenue), such as coaching and Sheffield Shield (by whatever name one wants to call it) are not 'costs' to be cut, but investments to be deployed with care and a sense of stewardship. The same goes for women's cricket in its various forms. These form the base from which funds are grown. For all his drawbacks, Sutherland managed to balance an accountant's computer approach to finances with a shrewd understanding of what makes the sport tick and he understood human relationships. Here's hoping we get some people who understand what really drives the game and who don't hate paying their workers. Anyone from a corporate background that is based on kicking workers please do not apply.

where do you work again BM? :laughing: :laughing:

Please No!

Won’t happen. It will be a mate of someone high up.

James Sutherland must be sunning himself on a beach somewhere wondering why he has been so lucky in life.

If Roberts is "dismissed", Shane Watson will suggest he has the decision reviewed.

The merry go round of overpaid sports executives.

I remember reading a comment about how woeful that bloke was, didn't realise it was Paul.

Here's an idea...can CA actually undertake a proper search for a CEO, instead of an internal tap on the shoulder?

I'm gonna start being nicer to Paul! He gets people sacked! :shocked: https://www.theroar.com.au/2020/06/13/now-that-vlandys-has-fixed-the-nrl-can-he-come-and-fix-the-cricket/ :stoked:

Sounds like NSWCA have won the game of politics here. The place has been hollowed out in recent years so the next CEO will be somewhat of an outsider. It will be interesting to see if there is a proper search for the next CEO or if NSW (or maybe a group of states) have their own "preferred candidate" waiting in the wings.

Good call, he is manifestly out of his depth in his current role.

I hear that Todd Greenberg & Raelene Castle are candidates for the job.

Kevin who?

It’s about time these overpaid sports executives are put under serious scrutiny! :thumbup:

For the CA board to move that quickly, he musty have been very bad