The pay dispute was a strong reminder of why cricket experience and knowledge of Australian sport are essential to wise decisions. Sutherland has both in spades, but remains tied down by having to tread carefully as a mere employee of his Board
Daniel Brettig16-Oct-2017There is a story from some years ago about a young Cricket Australia (CA) executive attending his first Board meeting. Not given to wearing ties, he took his seat without one, but before formalities began felt a tap on the shoulder. It was James Sutherland, quietly advising him that in Board meetings a tie needed to be worn, and motioning him to grab a spare from the chief executive’s office.That sort of quiet and deferential action in cricket’s conservative corridors of power has typified Sutherland’s longstanding tenure as CA’s CEO, which began in 2001 when he was younger than the then Test captain Steve Waugh, but has now stretched into a 16th year. While influential and successful in growing the game and ushering numerous major changes from the Big Bash League to this week’s announcement of league structures for Test and ODI cricket, Sutherland has always needed to ensure he carefully manages his relationship with the Board, as their chief employee but never their structural equal.In 1997, the year before Sutherland first joined what was then the Australian Cricket Board, the chief executive Graham Halbish had been sacked after falling out catastrophically with the Board chairman Denis Rogers. While specifics related to claims that Halbish was looking to make commercial deals without the Board’s knowledge, the broad fact was that the CEO and Board had grown apart: through dealing with five chairmen – Bob Merriman, Creagh O’Connor, Jack Clarke, Wally Edwards and David Peever – Sutherland has always tried to keep the CEO-chairman alliance as strong as possible.However the fact he has never been an executive director, both head of CA’s management and a partner in directing the game’s strategic direction, has at times limited Sutherland’s ability to use his pragmatic judgement as freely as possible. This has often been glimpsed via the public forum of media appearances, where Sutherland has seldom looked and sounded completely comfortable in expressing his views, as though conscious not to second-guess or contradict the views of his Board.Compare that to the strong and assured public presence of the AFL’s last four chief executives Ross Oakley, Wayne Jackson, Andrew Demetriou and Gillon McLachlan, and the contrast is stark. While personal character comes into it, the structural difference is also key. Ever since the AFL’s governance was reformed in 1993 with the creation of an independent commission to run the game, the chief executive has been a member of the commission, rather than merely being its employee.The authors of the report that led to that reform were David Crawford and Colin Carter, by common consensus the leading authorities on sporting governance in Australia. Six years ago they also put together a report on CA’s governance that led to the dismantling of the old 14-director Board of state-appointed delegates, replaced with a nine-person Board of independents. After seeing off a challenge from South Australia that included the threat of legal action, CA passed the Crawford-Carter report’s recommendations wholesale. All their recommendations but one, that is – the argument to make Sutherland an executive director.In asserting the sense of an executive director, Crawford and Carter wrote in part: “In our review of Australian sport for the Federal Government in 2009 we recommended that CEOs be appointed to the Boards of national sporting organisations and so it will not be a surprise that we recommend this for cricket as well.”CA is now a seriously large enterprise with annual revenues of around [Australian] $250 million per year and increasing. It has to be run as a business recognising both the business interests as well as the development of the sport including grass-roots operations. Cricket will increasingly recruit staff from the corporate sector and other professional codes, and to do this successfully it will need to offer positions and status that are comparable to the companies that the candidates might otherwise join.”To be successful in a large complex venture, the Board and management must work together. A Board cannot succeed without management’s help. And a CEO cannot survive without the Board’s support. They need each other and having the CEO as a member of the Board helps to achieve this. Our recommendation is that the CEO of CA be appointed to the CA Board as an Executive Director.”That recommendation was publicly highlighted when CA published the review and its resolutions in late 2011, yet by April 2012 the Board had determined that Sutherland was not to have his role elevated. The decision was seen as a vestigial pushback by the Board and the states, as the governance review was accompanied by a financial model review and also the more widely publicised Don Argus review of the declining performance of the national team. At a time of so much change, this was seen to be one reform too many.This time last year, it appeared that Sutherland’s time at CA might be drawing to a close. Not only had the Board’s choice as his successor emerged – the former New South Wales batsman and experienced corporate operator Kevin Roberts had left the Board to become one of Sutherland’s senior executives – but there were rumblings among the states about how much longer Sutherland should be allowed to stay on. Irrespective of the job he had done, 15 years was an awful long time in the role when all corporate research has suggested a chief executive should not stay on any longer than 10.Roberts had been entrusted, too, with the role of leading CA’s negotiations for the next MoU with the Australian Cricketers Association, much as Sutherland had been by his predecessor Malcolm Speed. In empowering Roberts to deal with the ACA, Sutherland was disempowered – not permitted to get involved in talks, and not comfortable about meeting with the players association chief executive Alistair Nicholson unless Roberts was also present. On May 12, Sutherland penned a letter highly critical of the ACA and asserting that the players would go unpaid unless the union agreed to negotiate on CA’s terms. While the letter greatly amped up the dispute, Nicholson in particular correctly judged that Sutherland’s own views were more pragmatic than the terms in which he had written.So as Roberts hit dead ends in his efforts to break up the fixed revenue percentage model at the heart of the MoU, Sutherland was left to wait until the urgency of the dispute and other related issues, such as numerous pending commercial deals and looming tours of Bangladesh and India, forced the Board to soften its stance. It has been noted by numerous observers that the deal finally reached in early August, after the players had gone unpaid for more than a month and the Australia A tour of South Africa cancelled, could easily have been struck months before. Perhaps it would have if Sutherland had been allowed to take part, or to freely express his opinion about the sports landscape as a Board director.Speaking after the dispute, Sutherland certainly did not miss the opportunity to note that the Board’s nine directors knew how things had been allowed to unfold. “We haven’t had a formal post-mortem or review on that, but suffice to say our Board was very much in touch with the to-ing and fro-ing of the negotiations all the way through, and understanding of how it unfolded and where we got to,” he told CA’s website in September. “We’ve only just signed off on the long-form agreement, but over the next couple of months we’ll have a closer look at learnings that can be applied onto the future.”That “closer look at learnings” has included the states almost universally expressing their displeasure at the way the dispute unfolded. At the same time they have shown newfound respect for the way Sutherland was able to work with other cool heads – such as Nicholson, Neil Maxwell, Pat Howard and the NSW chairman John Warn – to prevent the MoU from falling completely off the rails. For all the corporate experience that was added to the Board when it went independent in 2012, the pay dispute has provided a strong reminder of why cricket experience and knowledge of Australian sport is also essential to wise decisions. Sutherland, of course, has that in spades.Another example of the same arrived on Friday, when Sutherland was part of the move to finally bring league structures to Test matches and ODIs, beginning in 2019. Numerous attempts at bringing greater context to the game have been made over the past 16 years, and Sutherland has never been far away from them.In 2008 he told an ICC-members forum of the need for leagues in balance with Twenty20 tournaments, and also to respect the players and their associations: “Let’s face it, generally speaking, the Future Tours Programme is currently a hotch-potch of bilateral tour arrangements that, given the current volume of international cricket, produces matches that no longer linger in the memory or have lasting meaning.”Twenty20 is a winner… it’s here to stay and the challenge for us is to find the context and the balance to ensure that we don’t trip over ourselves or each other in our enthusiasm to ride the wave and capitalise on it. In this context, we should never lose sight of the fact that international cricket is the foundation on which this game has been built. It is not only our foundation, but for all members, possibly with the exception of India, we couldn’t survive without it. International cricket is our lifeblood… we compromise it at our peril.”We need to look after our players. We need to keep them close. We need to understand them. We need to respect their advisors and their member associations. We don’t have to always agree with them, but we should respect their views, as they should respect ours.”Given the events of 2017, these were all prescient words, and evidence of the sort of good judgement and balanced reading of the game that the CA Board needs. Six years after Crawford and Carter recommended it, the time has come for Sutherland to be granted the additional responsibility of a formal seat at the Board table – tie or no tie.
