Australian cricket captain Steve Smith is on a retainer of $1.2 million from Cricket Australia and he pockets $14,000 every time he pulls on a baggy green and runs out in a Test match.
When he sits down with his overworked accountant and adds up all the IPL payments, endorsements and sponsorship deals, the skipper’s annual income amounts to something well north of $3m.
His deputy Dave Warner trousers more than $4 million. He drives the wife and kids to the supermarket in a $450,000 Lamborghini Huracan and once bought a house for $6.25 million then sold it for $7 million.
How do these people get by?
Clearly, they’re on Struggle Street, because Smith and Warner are leading the charge as Australia’s cricketers man the barricades in a pay dispute that is threatening the Ashes series this year.
Cricket Australia is seeking to replace the existing revenue-sharing model with new contracts as part of a wider restructure of remuneration throughout the game — a move that has left Smith, Warner and their teammates unimpressed.
So unimpressed that Warner has suggested that Austalia “might not have a team for the Ashes”.
Mitchell Starc, whose Cricket Australia retainer is a mere $900,000, has also hinted at a strike on social media, strongly supported by Shane Watson, for many years the country’s highest-paid cricketer.
All of them, of course, will say that they are taking a stand for players at the lower level of the game. The domestic cricketers who are only pocketing salaries of $200,000 or so for playing a game.
But the truth is, these multi-millionaires in flannel are threatening to rob Australian sports fans of the greatest spectacle on our shores, the Ashes.
The five-Test Ashes series — something that we only get to enjoy in Australia once every four years — is being held to ransom.
Cricket Australia boss James Sutherland, in what was perhaps not the most subtle email he has ever sent, has threatened players will not be paid if they don’t sign on the dotted line by June 30.
That raises the prospect of the Ashes beginning in November with a team of second stringers. State players with existing long-term contracts could be drafted in to replace nationally contracted players. Moises Henriques’ name has been mentioned.
And who suffers from that? Not the players. Almost all of them have lucrative Twenty20 contracts to ensure that even if they lose their central contract, they won’t be starving on the picket line.
The ones to suffer will be cricket fans. We’ll either miss out on the Ashes all together or we’ll get to sit through dreary contests in which Joe Root’s men wipe the floor with a bunch of Sheffield Shield players.
The Ashes, at home or in England, is the holy grail of Australian sport. Not only the most prestigious and popular series in cricket, not only the most lucrative source of income for the game. It is the greatest contest in Australian sport.
For a bunch of multi-millionaires to be threatening to deprive us of it so they can keep up the payments on their latest Lamborghini is an outrage.
