Tym Glaser, Associate Editor - Sports

CRICKET AUSTRALIA (CA), the body that, well, governs cricket in Australia, has taken the sport to a dark place.

Before the first session of the first Test between hosts Australia and Sri Lanka at the Gabba last week, CA locked News Limited and wire agencies out of the ground after they refused to sign an agreement on terms of coverage.

Those terms included a coverage fee and restrictions on how stories and, particularly, pictures could be used and sold.

Basically, CA came out and told News Ltd. and the agencies, including Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and Getty Images - the organisations that give newspapers all around the world the reports you read and pics you see, that this series is our product and we want a piece of your profit pie.

The agencies formed a coalition, told CA they would not pay to cover news nor be told how to use their stories and pictures and pointed out where CA could stick the agreement.

Thus fans around the world, and in particular, Sri Lanka, had no newspaper coverage of the first Test in Brisbane between the best side in the world and one of the most exciting teams to watch.

There was still TV coverage because those broadcasters have a different rights agreement, but not everybody has access to cable TV or is willing to stay up or wake up at ungodly hours due to the antipodean time differential.

Nasty precedent

The impasse has been settled, for now, and the agencies will fire off their reports and pics from the current second Test at Bellerive Oval in Hobart.

However, a nasty precedent has been set with CA putting greed ahead of the game and damn the fans.

Believe it or not, the games we play are news, cricket matches are news and it's the job of news agencies to report the news.

That news should not have to be paid for, nor should media organisations be told how much to write and what they can sell and cannot sell.

The Rugby Football Union (RFU) tried the same trick as CA before this year's Rugby World Cup and was made to back-track double quick when the agencies boycotted en masse. The crunch came when the RFU held a press conference and all the photographers turned up and pointed their cameras at the floor.

There is an uneasy truce between CA and the media for now, but there's a market out there that it wants a piece of and the matter is sure to rise again.

Just as worryingly, the Indian cricket board (BCCI) has been monitoring the situation in Australia and sympathises with CA.

With India fast becoming the financial hub of cricket and the BCCI set to launch its Indian Premier League (IPL) next year, which will feature many of the world's top players in a Twenty20 tournament, a major battle could be looming which might just revolutionise coverage of not just cricket, but all popular international sports.

Theoretically, full rights, or certain rights, could be sold to individual news organisations and the others would be left out in the cold.

That would ultimately lead to bidding wars - much like what happens with TV rights to major sporting events, and the small players, like us in the West Indies, would be left out of the loop.

I really hope we don't go down that path but the 'big' teams' cricket boards have become corporations now and they want the full bang for the bucks they are putting into 'their' products.

Forget love of the game, it's all about love of the dollar or pound or rupee nowadays and we fans better get used to it.

Later

Feedback: tym.glaser@gleanerjm.com