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This was published 2 years ago
Chairman’s demise must signal start of renewal for Cricket Australia
By Malcolm Conn and Daniel Brettig
To lose one Cricket Australia chairman may be regarded as misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness. The second humiliating resignation in three years highlights how broken the game’s leadership has become.
The inevitable decision by Earl Eddings to fall on his sword, a day before Cricket Australia’s annual meeting after Western Australia joined Queensland and NSW in opposing his re-election, should only be the start of a renewal.
There needs to be a rebalancing of the CA board, which has drifted too far into the corporate world. Stronger ties are required with the state associations, which have direct connections to domestic, club and grassroots cricket.
More change is required if the CA board is to rid itself of the stain from a damning cultural review post-Sandpapergate and the self-inflicted wound of the war with the players over the last collective pay agreement.
John Harnden, chief executive at Melbourne and Olympic Parks, and Michelle Tredenick, a public director who specialises in finance, were on the board during the needless MoU dispute, the fallout from Sandpapergate and last year’s pandemic panic around the game’s finances.
As the longest serving directors with Eddings, the trio played a key role in running Australian cricket, controlling key committees and imposing their will. This was intriguing given that Harnden had been an unsuccessful candidate for chief executive of CA when Kevin Roberts got the job in 2018, even while remaining on the board.
Former Cricket Australia chairman Earl Eddings.Credit: Eddie Jim
Tredenick, meanwhile, was forced to recuse herself from any discussions pertaining to the 2018 cultural review because she was also on the board of the organisation conducting it, The Ethics Centre.
WA Cricket chairman Terry “Tuck” Waldron explained why the state’s board had withdrawn its support for Eddings.
“The board felt that over recent years they have not received the support they would have expected from Cricket Australia and the current uncertainty around the fifth Ashes Test was a contributing factor,” he said. “The board felt there needed to be a change in the governance at Cricket Australia.
“WA Cricket has always been supportive of Cricket Australia and we recognised that we need to work together to ensure that cricket remains one of the country’s biggest sports, however the board believe that change was necessary. We take our responsibility to our members and fans in Western Australia seriously and they have made their frustrations known.”
Cricket Australia chief executive Nick Hockley and West Australian CA director Dr Lachlan Henderson, a former WACA chairman, jointly updated the WACA board on the progress of the Ashes Test immediately before their board meeting on Tuesday night. Henderson then rang Eddings on Wednesday morning to convey the loss of support.
There was also frustration at the failure of Eddings to agree to an exit plan proposed by NSW and Queensland, which would have seen him leave the board by May 31 next year.
It’s only 10 years since the board was restructured, reducing the number of directors from 14 to nine (now 10) and making them more independent of the old lopsided state system.
That restructure only went through because of a last-minute compromise nutted out over the course of several beers between the Cricket Australia chairman and an adversarial state association powerbroker in the bar of Melbourne’s Pullman Hotel in 2011. It has inadvertently led to the most disunited decade in Australian cricket history.
Former Cricket Australia chairman Earl Eddings with Justin Langer on the Ashes tour in 2019.Credit: Getty
CA and the states are almost continually at odds and a succession of corporate leaders struggle to commit enough time to fulfil their cricket roles. The governing body’s visionary calls, such as introducing the Big Bash League and advancing the cause of women, recede ever further into the past; back, in fact, to the final years of the old board system.
It culminated on Wednesday with the acrimonious resignation of Eddings, just three years after his predecessor, Peever, met a similarly unhappy fate. The irony is that all this dysfunction has been at least partly the outcome of a measure devised to avoid a legal battle.
The South Australian Cricket Association and then president Ian McLachlan were prepared to take CA to court over the constitutional removal of its direct representation on the board of the governing body.
As a way of meeting in the middle, then CA chairman Wally Edwards conceded that each state would have a role on a nominations committee to “choose” its own director on the independent board, modelled by David Crawford and Colin Carter in similar fashion to the AFL Commission.
However, leadership decisions appear to have been made as much according to which directors have enough time to commit to leadership as by who is the best candidate. Edwards’ successor, Peever, became chairman following his retirement from an impressive-sounding role at Rio Tinto.
Eddings, in turn, was named as Peever’s deputy partly because he was considered a director likely to have time to deal with the extensive international responsibilities of the role. Last year, Jacquie Hey resigned from the board after her appointment as the chair of Bendigo Bank and apologised for the fact she would not have the time to be the first female chair in CA’s history.
Most state associations have long formed the view, whether privately or publicly, that the CA board should be a hybrid, with four independent directors and one directly appointed representative of each state. Critically, those six directors should not be discouraged from sharing time and information with the association that nominated them. It’s a common sense constitutional tweak that Eddings, Harnden and Tredenick have resisted.
Australian Cricketers’ Association chairman Greg Dyer agrees, even though he had a strong personal relationship with Eddings.
“While some progress has been made, it is clear the current model is flawed and requires a thorough review,” Dyer said.
Over the past decade, the infighting seen in the worst of the corporate world is hardly the kind of evolution Edwards and McLachlan had in mind when they finished their late-night schooners a decade ago.
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