As Cricket Australia chief executive, Nick Hockley has struggled with public presentation and has overseen a hat-trick of mismanaged issues around David Warner’s Newlands ban, Justin Langer’s resignation as coach and Tim Paine’s exit as captain.
But it is the navigation of a new broadcast rights deal in the Australian market and a parallel collective bargaining agreement with the Australian Cricketers’ Association that will be the ultimate measure of whether Hockley’s tenure continues beyond next year.
Cricket Australia CEO Nick Hockley has struggled in the spotlight. Credit:Getty
Sources close to the CA board have confirmed to The Age and The Herald that the Warner fiasco was not deemed a sufficiently bad episode for directors to lose confidence in their chief executive.
However, there is also recognition that Hockley, a major events specialist who cut his teeth on Olympics and cricket World Cups before taking over from the deposed Kevin Roberts in 2020, needs to have some major wins in the next few months.
The Warner affair was discussed at length during a regular board meeting in Adelaide on the first two days of the Test match between Australia and the West Indies.
In particular, the board needed to be brought up to date on the many undulations of a process that had got away from Hockley and Jacqui Partridge, the CA head of integrity who appointed the conduct code commissioners meant to hear Warner’s case and the counsel assisting them.
Hockley has insisted the unforeseen insistence of the commissioners Alan Sullivan, Adrian Anderson ad Robert Heath for a public hearing was an unavoidable result of keeping at arm’s length from the process, in line with Sports Integrity Australia regulations.
By contrast, the broadcast deal is the biggest performance target for any sporting chief executive, and the players’ pay deal is not too far behind. There will be no outsourcing of expertise here.
Otherwise, the accumulating baggage of the Warner, Langer and Paine sagas will assume greater prominence if they are accompanied by failure to wring as much value as possible out of the broadcast rights deal or reach middle ground with the ACA.
Earlier this year, CA’s directors encouraged a management reshuffle that saw Hockley given a chief of staff, the former South Australian Cricket Association interim chief executive Jodie Newton.
This move was devised to ensure that head office at Jolimont continued to run smoothly whenever Hockley needed to take on a more strategic frame of mind, but it also illustrated the board’s wish that their CEO not get lost in the minutiae of the job.
Equally, directors agree that judging a chief executive purely in terms of their role as the public face of CA’s corporate wing can be reductive next to their management of major decisions.
As an example, James Sutherland was always seen as a reserved and occasionally awkward media performer but did the CA CEO job for 18 years, whereas the much more outwardly confident Roberts made enough mistakes to be out within 18 months.
Nevertheless, there are now few expectations that Hockley will improve any more than he has in terms of public speaking – with most key observers accurately predicting that his response to Warner’s withdrawal from the integrity process to overturn his lifetime leadership ban would be stilted and limited.
One of the most intriguing elements to Hockley’s tenure is that his counterpart at the ACA, the suave Todd Greenberg, is widely seen as a likely successor should CA’s directors wish to go in another direction.
While Greenberg and Hockley had, until the Warner saga, formed an effective tandem on a range of issues, including the Australian men’s team completing successful tours of Pakistan and Sri Lanka this year when past regimes may have backed out, the undercurrent of succession is getting harder to avoid.
