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Past Australian cricketers have been left disillusioned by the scrapping of hospitality functions traditionally held at men’s home Test matches, replaced by the offer of a ticket and a $30 food and drink voucher.
At a time of considerable friction between past players, the current team and cricket administrators more generally, the decision of the Australian Cricketers’ Association to downgrade the former cricketers’ invitations to Test matches has been poorly received.
The victorious Australian Ashes touring team of 1989 during a ticker-tape parade in Sydney.Credit:Craig Golding
International and state players are used to being invited as ACA life members to a function at their home Test match each summer, customarily capped at 50 attendees, where past playing generations can catch up, sit back and watch the current team.
So, there was understandable angst when informed earlier this month that invitations to the Tests in Perth this week and Adelaide next week against West Indies, then Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney against South Africa, would now only get them a ticket in the stands and a voucher.
As part of the invitation, players are asked which other players they would like to sit with, underlining the difference between a grandstand seat and a function room in which to move around.
“It’s a slap to past players,” one former Australian cricketer told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. “Come if you want to, but we don’t really care - that’s the message I take from it.”
Take up for the tickets and voucher offer has been minimal so far, as past player groups discuss whether attending would be seen as acceptance of the change.
There is less unease about the amount of money being invested into past player welfare than there is about the lack of courtesy shown to the former cricketers that helped create the platform on which the present team lives so well, thanks to a succession of ever-richer pay deals, the next of which will be signed in 2023. Past players, they argue, helped to build the current pie.
The ACA’s argument in response is that attendances for these functions have been dwindling despite their considerable cost to the organisation, and that past players will additionally be invited not only to attend a day’s Test cricket but also to a hospitality function at a Sheffield Shield game, where they will also be asked to put their views to the association.