Former Australia captain suggested Cricket Australia and its players to extend their previous contract for another year in the wake of a pay dispute with 230 of their cricketers without contracts.
The future tours, including the high-profile Ashes series later in the year are in jeopardy with talks between CA and the Australian Cricketers’ Association reaching an impasse.
The previous Memorandum of Understanding ended 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.
Recently, the players threatened to boycott an ‘A’ team tour of South Africa later this month unless CA trashed out a new agreement. “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 was quoted as saying. “Cricket Australia, the Australian Cricketers’ Association, please go behind closed doors and sort this in private.
“The players want to play... let’s allow them to play while this stuff gets sorted out in the background.”
CA’s insistence of scrapping the revenue sharing model to increase funding in the grassroots has escalated matters further between he two parties, “I don’t want the Australian players to be unprepared because they have been concentrating on something else; give them 12 months and let them concentrate on the cricket,” Clarke said. “I don’t want to see any cricket missed. There will be a compromise. The ACA and Cricket Australia will find a way to make this work,” he added.
If the dispute continues, a two-Test tour of Bangladesh and a One-day International series in India also remain in doubt. The ACA had summoned CA chief executive James Sutherland for negotiations but he has remained silent since e-mailing players last month, and had informed the players that they would be unemployed if they didn’t sign the new contract.
Former Australia captain Ian Chappell slammed Sutherland’s move, “It does seem very strange. You’ve got to wonder what the hell is going on,” Chappell said. “They’ve done a few strange things and Sutherland not being involved is one of them. I don’t see a really good reason for him not to be. “I can’t believe they will want to upset India, so I would have thought that something will happen before
“Because they won’t want to cancel that. If they get something done then, people will have probably forgotten by [the time the Ashes start in] November,” he added.
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