adminSYDNEY. – Australia’s cricketers and board should extend their previous agreement by 12 months while they attempt to find a solution to a bitter pay dispute, former captain Michael Clarke said yesterday.
The previous Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) expired at midnight on Friday with no sign of a deal in place, leaving around 230 leading cricketers without contracts and the fate of future tours in limbo. Once the deadline passed, Australia’s players threatened to boycott an “A” team tour of South Africa later this month unless a new agreement was struck with Cricket Australia beforehand. “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 . . . et’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. – Reuters.
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