Cricket: Showdown looms over tour finances

By DON CAMERON

While New Zealand Cricket has happily tucked away its $4.2 million allocation from the 1999 World Cup - sadly, without a bonus for reaching the semifinals - the rest of world cricket seems determined to show how crazily complex the game's tour finances have become.

The England and Wales Cricket Board took a profit of $100 million from last year's World Cup. The ECB retained $41 million, the other participating countries received $4.2 million each.

The rest, one assumes, would go to the International Cricket Council, which owns the cup and the event.

But the ICC and the ECB are having a tiff. The ICC maintains that the profit should have been higher.

People, not only on the ICC, are poking a stick at the ECB for planning to have eight major sponsorships, and obtaining only four - dropping that take from $48 million to $33 million.

The ECB countered with the fact that the 1999 profit was only $3 million below the figure planned four years before, but also said that the shortfall in sponsorship revenue was almost covered by increased ticket sales.

All this is water under an Avon River bridge for NZC, which is content that its grant of $500,000 from the 1995-96 World Cup in the subcontinent has increased eight-fold.

World Cup money is now the ace in the NZC hole. Tour profits ebb and flow, and without the stable World Cup income every four or five years NZC would not be able to cover the occasional deficit, or allocate money for some future enterprise.

This and the apparent genius that Christopher Doig, the CEO, has for raising money from patrons and sponsors means that NZC has, by world standards, one of the more stable and sensible financial bases.

Certainly, several countries, with the West Indies leading the way, must envy New Zealand's solid financial structure.

World cricket finances in the past seem to have been written by a blunt stick in the sand at low-water mark. When the West Indies toured England or Australia, all the West Indies' expenses would be met by the host country.

The West Indies would also negotiate a heavy cash guarantee.

New Zealand would play the same tune, in a minor key. It became a jerry-built arrangement, tacked together by lengthy, but often erratic planning.

Such crazy irregularities made cricket treasurers grey and wizened before their time.

So last February the ICC, following up moves started by the late Bob Vance, the New Zealand Cricket Council chairman, and continued by Doig and Sir John Anderson, of the present NZC, changed the pattern.

The basic plan was that tours would have reciprocal financial arrangements. New Zealand going to South Africa late this year would strike a financial pattern to be used when South Africa made a similarly shaped tour of New Zealand.

There were exceptions. New Zealand could ask for more money from Australia because of the heavy international programmes favoured across the Tasman.

All the ICC countries agreed, except the West Indies. Now the reason is clear. When the West Indies toured England in 1995, they took home a guarantee of $2.2 million.

Under the new tour financial structure, the West Indies maintain they will gain only $392,000.

Cricket tours to the West Indies are very expensive, while spectator revenue is not heavy. Rather than use the several Caribbean currencies for players' contracts many years ago, the West Indies decided that all contracts would be written in United States dollars. The US dollar has retained its value.

The Caribbean currencies have not. So the players' contracts have had a built-in inflation bonus, and when this is multiplied by numerous players over the last 30 or 40 years, the overall cost to the West Indies is very heavy.

They must make well-heeled tours to Australia and England to cover their own high costs. Home sponsorship revenue and gate-takings do not balance the books.

The West Indies have a case, but it must be solved. Otherwise eight test-playing countries will tug in one direction and the West Indies in another, and the whole tour financial system could again be built on wet sand.