November 06 Wednesday 2002
NZ cricket heads for crisis with India tour pending

AUCKLAND: New Zealand cricket was Tuesday in turmoil as the country's players looked set to go on strike just one month before the Indian team was due to begin a tour.

The Cricket Players Association (CPA) earlier Tuesday rejected a pay offer while their employers New Zealand Cricket (NZC) cancelled any further talks and said the two sides had reached an impasse. Despite events in New Zealand Indian cricket board secretary Karunakaran Nair said in New Delhi that the tour was still on.

"There is still a month to go, but as far as we are concerned, the tour is on," he told. "We would obviously like to play against the best team." Although the dispute is a complicated one over how to divide up revenues from first class cricket, it was apparent there is a personality clash between NZC's chief executive Martin Snedden and CPA's Rob Nichols.

CPA is demanding a player payments pool of 7.2 million NZ dollars (3.4 million US) while management NZC are offering 4.7 million dollars for the upcoming season.

Snedden in turn wants to go around CPA and negotiate directly with players but he is running into New Zealand employment law which gives employees the right of collective negotiation. Nichol said his side was rejecting the pay offer but was willing to resume domestic cricket if mediation talks started immediately.

He said they were unable to rely on financial information from the employer. Nichol said the NZC offer may have breached New Zealand employment law on the right to collective bargaining. "The offer constitutes a take-it-or-leave-it offer and threatens to undermine the association by approaching individual players," Nichol said.

Following that Snedden announced that NZC had disengaged from negotiations. He said the State Max competition, scheduled for November 16 and 17, and the Provincial A Competition, scheduled to begin on January 2, have been cancelled.

"Despite six months of negotiations with the CPA we have not made any progress on the key issues and the season is fast approaching," he said. "We have acted so we can get on with the State domestic season and to ensure we can field a team for the National Bank Series versus India," Snedden said. "Our final offer to the CPA was fair. It significantly increased remuneration and income security for both international and first-class domestic players.

"We have reached an impasse. The NZCPA offer today contained nothing new. The issues raised have been dealt with previously. It is now time for us to move forward and get on with the cricket season."

Nichol later told Television New Zealand that for players now the issue was no longer about money. "If it was about money guys would have sold out a long time ago, these guys are under extreme pressure at the moment," he said, saying the membership wanted representation at top level.

Snedden said there were "very tight financial limitations" available to NZC and the offer was "very very good". He said NZC wanted to talk directly to the players who did not understand the position. "We have been denied that opportunity, restricted from putting our case to the players," Snedden said.