Hard Bargains

GH on contracts

It is forty-six years since Cricket Australia began contracting Australian cricketers in order to ‘bind’ them to provide ‘stipulated services’ to the official game. The Australian Cricket Board’s so-called ‘key player agreements’, though chiefly concerned with marketing exclusivity, were first of all to guard against a repeat of World Series Cricket; the irony is that each of the twenty offered, worth a princely $7500 each, had to be signed off by Kerry Packer’s PBL Marketing, poacher abruptly turned gamekeeper. Perhaps for this reason, the names of those contracted remained confidential.

Today the list of contracted players is very much an announceable, and interpreted, as yesterday, as a mark of progress and prestige: Weatherald in, Konstas out; Neser upgraded, Maxy pensioned. But it remains, primarily, about providing the administration with security over its playing assets. Elsewhere in the game, the emergent system is more temporary and transactional. The great change of the last twenty years has been not only the eclipse of Test cricket by T20, or international by domestic, but of what we might call monogamy by polyamory. Michael Clarke retired from Test cricket a decade ago having represented only four teams: New South Wales, Australia, plus a season each with Hants and Pune Warriors. David Warner retired from Test cricket just over two years ago and continues adding shirts to his wardrobe.