Cummins, Head offered $10 million each to quit Australian cricket for T20 circuit

2 hours ago 3

Australia’s captain Pat Cummins and deputy Travis Head were informally offered nearly $10 million a year each to quit Australian cricket and play in overseas Twenty20 franchise leagues full-time.

Top Australian players typically earn about $1.5 million a year from their national contracts. Cummins’ international cricket income is worth about $3 million once his captaincy stipend is taken into account.

Pat Cummins and Travis Head declined $10 million offers to play year-round franchise cricket.

The offers, made this year by an IPL team group, were politely rebuffed by two of Australia’s most valuable cricket assets, who remain firmly committed to the national team.

But according to three senior cricket sources not authorised to speak about private discussions, they have surfaced in talks between Cricket Australia, the state associations and the players’ union about whether to privatise the Big Bash League.

The offers have been used as an example of how tenuous Australian cricket’s hold on its players is becoming, and as part of the argument for bolstering the BBL with private capital that would raise player salaries, and also link the T20 league into a growing global network of franchise owners.

Cricket Australia declined to comment, as did Cummins’ management. Head’s management was contacted for comment.

England fast bowler Jofra Archer rejected a year-round deal to play for Mumbai Indians in 2023, with the offer purportedly worth as much as $7.5 million over 12 months. Concerns are held for the likes of 26-year-old Cameron Green, who is also on the books of the Mumbai franchise, owned by the powerful Ambani family.

Cummins’ IPL auction value with Sunrisers Hyderabad last year was worth almost $3.7 million, while Head played at the same franchise for about $1.2 million.

South African Heinrich Klaasen, a teammate of theirs at the IPL franchise, retired from all forms of international cricket in June to play franchise cricket exclusively.

While Cummins and Head are among Australia’s most marketable athletes, their current salaries pale in comparison with the country’s highest sporting earners. That list is headlined by Formula 1 driver Oscar Piastri (about $40 million), NBA player Josh Giddey (about $38 million) and NFL player Jordan Mailata (about $34 million). Those sports have private ownership.

Heinrich Klaasen on the rampage before he quit international cricket.

Last year, Head and Cummins both played in the IPL and the American Major League Cricket tournament either side of that year’s T20 World Cup in the Caribbean. Head told this masthead that he had wanted to experience what it was like to play franchise cricket more intensively.

“I played MLC to get a taste of what it would be like to play franchise cricket,” Head said. “I had IPL into a World Cup into MLC, so I wanted to see what it was like to basically play four months of franchise cricket.

“You want to have every option available to you, you want to experience things and understand how things operate. A lot of people are making certain decisions around the world, and it was a perfect opportunity for me to understand that and see what it was like for whenever the time comes for what I may or may not do in the future.

“Whether I could do it, whether I liked it, whether I was good at it. I hadn’t played a lot of T20 cricket for a period of time, so get back into that. It was a perfect time in my life [to do that], then that time moves past.”

Since then, Head has decided that he will concentrate on playing in the IPL and the BBL when available, while extending his international career for as long as possible.

“Currently I’m playing for Australia, and I don’t see a timeline where I can play anything [else] really,” Head said. “The IPL takes a big chunk of things, and I want to commit, as much as I can, to Australia. I missed a tour in the West Indies for some rest, which I needed.

“Ideally, I wouldn’t want to do that, but in the current situation we’re in, we need to plan the year out. If I’m missing cricket for Australia, I’m not going to fill in games in the MLC or the Hundred [in the UK].”

Head defended the rights of players, such as Klaasen, to drop out of international cricket, and said that not all players viewed national duty with the same reverence.

“I spent a lot of time with Klaasen over a period of time while he was making decisions,” Head said. “I don’t think there’s any written rule on what you should or shouldn’t play or what you should or shouldn’t give up. There’s an idea on what people should think, and what they should do.

“Playing international cricket is the pinnacle. A lot of people hold it so high in regard, but some people don’t. People have got to respect that there’s no one way to go about it.

“A lot of people would give their left nut to play international cricket, and that comes from someone who’s played a lot of cricket or someone who’s played none, who wants to do it. So when someone gives up that opportunity it’s ‘why are you doing it?’ But there’s a reason, and you’ve got to respect that.

“What’s happening in the world at the moment is people have opportunities to make those decisions, which we’ve never had [before]. So it’s hard to knock someone who is making a decision in their own personal state and trying to get job satisfaction. Fair play.”

Klaasen recently said he thought bilateral 50-over cricket would need to disappear from the calendar in the future to create room for other formats.

“I think the only change that I will make is probably take [bilateral] one-day cricket away from international cricket,” he told Cricbuzz. “Make it more Test matches for teams that don’t play a lot of Test matches. Play more T20 cricket because that’s what the people want to see. You can keep your one-day world cups, and just maybe a month before the one-day World Cup starts, you play five games for every team, just to get used to that format.

“If they don’t take care of the international players, they will go out and go to the leagues to make some extra cash. If you look at the Aussies and the England boys, they get looked after well, so they don’t need to go around the world and go play all these leagues.”

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