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How Cricket Australia's $1bn TV mirage has cost the game dear

<span>Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

In April 2018, Cricket Australia announced a new television rights deal worth $1.18bn. Chief executive James Sutherland sealed the final negotiations that had been conducted by his head of broadcasting and commercial, Ben Amarfio. Given that it was a couple of weeks since the ball-tampering scandal that enveloped the men’s Test team, the deal was presented as a triumph for the sport. It was to be a new era, with the rights leaving the Nine Network for the first time since the 1970s, moving to Fox Sports and Seven West Media.

Skip forward to 2020, and the colours of that bright new dawn might have been caused by toxic clouds on the horizon. While CA tries to stabilise the sport in a viral world, Seven is blustering about abandoning the contract entirely. The network’s CEO, James Warburton, has made a series of aggressive statements that peaked with calling CA “the most incompetent administration I’ve ever worked with”. Seven’s next instalment with Fox of $50m is due on Tuesday, 15 September and the beginning of the season is barely a fortnight away.

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Within six months of their 2018 celebrations, Sutherland retired and Amarfio was sacked. Australian cricket was left with the legacy of their deal. In true used-car style, it was a good-looking dud. Before signing it, Sutherland had shaken hands on a different deal with Network Ten, the channel that had turned the Twenty20 Big Bash from a novelty joke into a summer winner. Backed by its new American owner, CBS, Ten wanted the game in its entirety. The offer was around $950m. The sweetener was that this would include screening all domestic cricket. With the latitude of secondary digital channels, the neglected secondary tier of the professional game, would be freely available to any viewer in the country. Ten would become the cricket network.

Except that after shaking hands, Sutherland took a final counter-offer from Seven and Fox. CA had long been obsessed with topping a billion dollars, wanting to prove that cricket was up with the big boys of the Australian Football League and the National Rugby League. The board was equally culpable in encouraging this fixation. The group bid topped the magic number.

But the billion came at a cost. Instead of a dedicated cricket network, the game on television is now split. Where Ten made the Big Bash a nightly staple, its times and dates now splatter the airwaves erratically. Instead of free access, a slab of Big Bash and international games are locked away on pay-TV, meaning most Australians cannot watch teams that carry their own country’s name and are subsidised by their taxes. The rest of the domestic cricket that might have been on the air is confined to web streams.

The billion-dollar mark was always cosmetic – CA negotiators bumped up the contract duration to six years rather than five to get past the mark. But you wonder what sort of due diligence the organisation did on its new partners’ ability to meet payments. Both Fox Sports and Seven are in a state of financial fragility. Fox made plenty of noise about downgrading its cricket deal earlier this year, though for now this seems to have settled. Seven, via its CEO James Warburton, is doubling down.

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Much like CA’s current management, Warburton inherited the deal from his predecessor. Unlike CA, he has been strategically public in his dislike of it. Earlier this year Seven was quick to suggest a discount based on coronavirus cancellations. Once a full schedule was assured, Seven wanted a discount because the Big Bash would suffer from not featuring Australia’s internationals. Then came claims that the delayed schedule had hurt ad sales, or the ordering had too much paywall-exclusive cricket early in the season.

All of which gives the sense that the reason for the discount is not what matters, as long as there is a discount. Scoring a big reduction from the AFL must have worsened the thirst. But the AFL this season had fewer matches. Cricket won’t. The line about the quality of domestic matches is especially nonsense – international players have barely featured domestically in decades. David Warner has played three Big Bash games in his life. CA is poised to deliver, at the least, a women’s international series, into a full women’s Big Bash, into the men’s counterpart, into a Test series against India. Seven has nothing in the contract to complain about.

So when it comes to Seven’s threat to terminate, there is little doubt the network is bluffing. That is borne out by the fact that Warburton’s public broadsides bear no relation to the normal conversations that others at the network are carrying on with CA as they always do. From a weak legal position, public relations trouble can be a way to exert pressure. Causing enough of a ruckus might make CA cut a deal just to make it go away.

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The final part of the bluff is that Seven will not attempt an entire summer without a major sport. When losing the Australian Open to Nine in 2018 while gaining the cricket, both networks tried to spin the swap as a win. But if cricket is available in a fire sale, you’d better believe that Nine or Ten will find some cash. The kerfuffle between broadcasters alone would drive ratings.

As for those who actually broadcast the game at Seven, they are left feeling like teenagers whose embarrassing dad is yelling at their friends. They cannot get on with their work while management gets into fights. In the worst case, the entire summer could be marooned on pay television. More likely, the first item on the schedule will be collateral damage if Seven’s bluff goes the distance. As ever, the women’s game would get screwed. After having the 2021 World Cup postponed, the New Zealand women and most of the Australians are quarantining in Brisbane for 14 days just to play six days of cricket to start the summer. It will be Australia’s first outing since pulling 86,000 people to the MCG last March. If they don’t get on the air, the billion-dollar mirage left by CA’s old regime will start to cost cricket even more.