The pay dispute dividing Australian cricket is finally over, and this summer's Ashes series has been saved, but the new deal over cricketers' pay marks a historic boost to the women's game.

The pay deal reached between Cricket Australia (CA) and the Australian Cricketers' Association (ACA), following months of bitter negotiations, will apply to all male and female players for the first time in Australian cricket.

The deal is being lauded as the biggest pay rise in the history of women's sport in the country.

Female player payments will increase from $7.5 million to $55.2 million.

"[It's] a gender equity pay model, with the biggest pay rise in the history of women's sport in Australia," ACA chief executive Alistair Nicholson said.

In a modernised revenue-sharing formula, CA forecasts a player payments pool of $459 million, which covers all male and female players.

Furthermore, a performance pool will continue for male players while being extended to include the Australian women's team.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-03/cricket-pay-deal-lauded-womens-pay...

The relationship between sport and democracy is very important. More to come.

Following this week’s revelation of more salary cap violations, the NRL will table a revised pay deal demanding a greater share of paper bag and car park revenue.

League bosses have made the decision after being encouraged by news from the Crime Commission of widespread illegal player payments in rugby league.

The Commission’s reports released earlier this week confirmed the game is corrupt and run by the underworld, providing a timely double boost for the NRL.

Not only did it affirm it is “business as usual” in rugby league, it also disproved the RLPA’s notion the players are struggling to make ends meet on their current paltry rates of fully-declared taxable income.

Speaking from under a flat-brimmed green eyeshade, one NRL official described the breakthrough as ‘striking a blow for corporate rights’ in pay deal negotiations.

As a result, league bosses will move to capture a greater slice of the players’ illegitimate pie in the new bargaining agreement.

Their revised offer will propose a 29 per cent share in all illegal player payments, a figure which will increase annually in three per cent increments until capping at an amount equal to the Roosters’ payroll.

In addition, the NRL will also include a clause guaranteeing access to the players’ non-traditional rorts, including a minimum of one $350,000 part-time cleaning contract for each board member’s mother.

read more:

http://www.theroar.com.au/2017/07/09/pay-dispute-sees-nrl-seeking-greate...

This of course could be "fake news"...

The Australia national women's rugby union team, also known as the Wallaroos, are the national women's rugby union team of Australia. The Wallaroos have competed at the past five Women's Rugby World Cups in 1998, 2002, 2006 and 2010, and 2014.

Australian women have been playing rugby since the late 1930s, in regional areas of New South Wales. In 1992 the first National Women's Tournament as held in Newcastle, NSW. The following year the Australian Women's Rugby Union was established, and it was declared that the national women's team would be called the Wallaroos.

read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_women%27s_national_rugby_union_team

Meanwhile at the big boys department:

At the moment Australian rugby looks dysfunctional, delusional and just about dead and buried. But maybe, just maybe, there is a flicker of hope. On the same day as the Wallabies’ unacceptable performance against the All Blacks, an ARU media release went largely unnoticed.

The ARU announced work would begin on a new model for high performance, which recognised the importance of grassroots rugby as well as playing, coaching and innovation.

Performance is the key word. In Australia the game has too often been about dollars, while in New Zealand it has always been about performance. This is the fundamental difference in the rugby cultures of the two countries, separated by a marginal sea just 2,000 kilometres across, yet so far apart.

For example, the ARU’s recent decision to cull the Western Force from Super Rugby was primarily a financial one. Australian rugby could not afford to maintain five Super Rugby teams. The Force were cut not because they were in financial difficulty, but because the three traditional teams – the Brumbies, NSW Waratahs and Queensland Reds – were all struggling to varying degrees.

Getting rid of the Force was like throwing ballast off a sinking ship. Ironically, the Perth-based side was potentially the most financially secure of the lot with the support of mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, but someone had to go and they were the easiest to chop because of their “alliance” with the ARU.

New Zealand also wanted Australia to reduce to four teams, but for a different reason. The Kiwis had become deeply concerned about the decline in the standard of Super Rugby in Australia and to a lesser degree South Africa and actively pushed for the axing of teams.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/aug/21/australian-rugby-looks-dys...

On 7 October 1979, the day the Australian women’s football team played their first official international fixture, the Sydney Morning Herald didn’t publish so much as a column inch of preview.

The following day, however, after Australia and New Zealand played out a 2-2 draw at Seymour Shaw Park in the southern Sydney suburb of Miranda, the Sun-Herald did manage a feature story about the match – and in the seventh paragraph it even got around to revealing the score. The delay in getting to the result was, it seems, necessary, as if readers needed to be reassured that despite the playing of the historic match the natural order hadn’t been overly disturbed.

The opening paragraph read: “The first thing you notice about a women’s soccer match is the players. They ARE feminine.”

When Julie Dolan, Australia’s captain that day, is reminded of the media coverage – of a type that was typical at the time – her resulting sigh has echoes of old frustrations. “It was always difficult for us to get any funding, any recognition, and [the media’s angle] was part of that,” says Dolan, a dynamic midfielder and playmaker whose name now features on the medal awarded to the W-League’s player of the year.

“As it shows, it’s been a long road in terms of breaking down those barriers and for females to be accepted as strong athletes.”

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/sep/16/they-are-feminine-the-m...

The striker [Sam Kerr] , who has scored three times against Brazil in the past week alone, was overlooked in favour of USA star Carli Lloyd, Venezuelan teenager Deyna Castellanos and Lieke Martens, part of Holland’s successful Euro 2017 side.

Many voiced their dissent on social media where Fifa was mocked for not including a player who this year became the all-time leading goalscorer in America’s National Women’s Soccer League, where she plays for Sky Blue FC in New Jersey.

Joining in the derision were USA player Kelley O’Hara and Matildas goalkeeper Lydia Williams.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/sep/23/outrage-as-sam-kerr-omi...

It was an Australian—Kerry Packer, to be precise—who destroyed my interest in professional cricket once and for all. He turned the game (in my estimation) into yet another vulgar spectacle in a world hardly short of vulgar spectacles. No doubt this was in some sense inevitable and of great financial advantage to the players, who until then had been paid very badly; but my view of professional cricket until then had been as of a vocation rather than a career. I felt about post-Packer cricket as I feel about a deconsecrated church now being used as a nightclub, and also as I feel about rugby union since its professionalisation.

The latter seems to have had a strange biological effect, rather like the addition of the hormone thyroxine to the water in which cave-dwelling salamanders live permanently in larval form: they change into something else entirely. In the case of rugby players, they grew two feet taller and three feet wider; there were no such terrifyingly muscle-bound monsters, refugees from horror films, in my childhood and youth.

Read more:

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/05/the-blue-skies-of-sporting-memory/

Read from top.

At his level, you can ONLY BLAME THE AMERICANS. The rest of the planet had to follow the beefing-up of athletes for the Olympics ("non professional") and other sports (like war). Blaming Kerry Packer for the cricket weather-change is under the belt. Kerry turned a game that was as entertaining as watching a crack in the wall expand or contract, into something in which the masses could drink beer to, while singing "Aussie com'on" without having to care a hoot about the result. Sure the old flanelled ways had more traditional cobwebs but what's wrong with a bit of 20-20 bravado?

In regard to Rugby and Rugby league, one can blame Uncle Rupe for the changes. In 1908, Rugby League was invented for "professionals". But until Rupert's SuperLeague, were the players not built like tanks. Here we also need to look at Arthur Betson, this magnificent player from Queensland who could not be brought down by any opposing teams. Only the referee's whistle would tell Arthur that he had been caught while still standing up. But the Murdoch's family Super-league changed the rules of the game and after a brawl with the NRL (National Rugby League) players became overpaid and beefed up like bulls playing rough to win the favours of cows in a prairie.

So now some players are short of a few shingles and big like brick-houses... In AFL, players under two metres tall are considered challenged. Same with Basketball — that stupid game where players are taller than the hoops, are overpaid and wear brands of shoes. Yes, sports is now about advertising, products, logos, gambling and fast cars and girls and boys and idiots. So what? This is ENTERTAINMENT. always been, like watching grass grow. Apart from teaching a few players how to fight and prepare for WW1, sports in England was about an idea to pass the time of day, while the soup was simmering on the stove, and the woman was looking after the kids... It was a bit more refreshing than going to church which also was obligatory, before going to the sacred oval while dreaming of being a star English player in the bodyline series.

Read from top.

Despite missing the overall record for a women’s sporting event, the crowd at the MCG passed a host of other benchmarks.

The total beats the estimated 80,000 who watched Australia win the 1997 ODI World Cup final in Kolkata, the previous record for a women’s cricket match. The Australian record for a standalone fixture was also smashed, beating the 53,034 figure for fans at the 2019 AFLW grand final at the Adelaide Oval. The previous highest crowd for a Women’s T20 World Cup final was 12,717 in 2009.

But while there was plenty to celebrate at the venue there was room for criticism elsewhere. Channel Nine were castigated by AFLW pioneer Susan Alberti for broadcasting the final on their secondary channel Gem to avoid a scheduling clash with the six o’clock news and Married At First Sight.

“I think it is disgusting it is going to be on Gem and not on the main channel,” Alberti was reported to have said at an MCG function.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/mar/08/huge-mcg-crowd-turns-up-fo...

Read from top.

What the Women playing cricket (and some media like the Guardian) don't understand with TV programming is that ADVERTISERS were sold SIX MONTHS AGO on the idea to buy six o’clock news and Married At First Sight 30 second spots... Thus the advertising is targeted to people watching crap rather than sports. I am going to wet my feet in hot water here that advertisers for perfumes, wedding dresses and make-up kits don't want to be seen on sports played by sweaty (and possibly lesbian) women. There I've committed a crime, by possibly telling the truth — not about the women playing cricket, but about ADVERTISERS and TV executives...