Chris O'Connor
Player Valuation: £35m
I think Michael who also recognised the disparity in payments in his own playing career would have every sympathy.
The two situations have startling similarities, Pakistan don't give their test players huge wages, they aren't a rich board at all, play all their matches abroad - even home matches and struggle to attract any sort of income from TV. Their top stars have to play in their own T20 franchise tournament, as the IPL is out of bounds, plus others around the world to make a good living. At 27 he possibly realises that commercially he's at his most saleable and teams will pay well to get him.
In the late 1970s, early 80's Kerry Packer promoted a rival World Series test and one day cricket to that run by the international board at the time, largely by the ECB and their Australian counterparts. Test cricket was extremely poorly run with the players only receiving a comparative pittance for playing.
The West Indies paid buttons and Kerry Packer, an Australian media mogul financed a rival structure which paid the players far more, a fortune compared to the established game. Not surprisingly the West Indies defected to Packer en masse - Michael included, their board always amongst the most financially poor, and World Series Cricket (WSC) was born.
The ICC took Packer and WSC to the very highest court in Lomdon, but embarrassingly lost and the case was thrown out with Packer being found to have no case to answer.
The Australian board had to bow to all Packer's demands in an effort to get the 'rebels' -basically all the good players, back to test cricket. Packer's channel was awarded exclusive rights to all Aussie tests and Richie Benaud who had always championed the breakaway, introduced the first ever broadcast test matches on channel seven in Australia.
Kerry Packer brought lots of innovations to WSC with white balls, floodlight cricket, coloured clothing, imported ready prepared wickets which could be installed at stadia where it would have been impossible to prepare one, marker disks for the inner circle of fielders and much more, all of which although initially frowned upon and contemptuously nicknamed pyjama cricket, has been assimilated into our own one day game.
The Aussie board did all it could to stop Packer before their capitulation, banning test grounds from holding WSC matches, so that the best cricketers in the world often had to resort to playing in greyhound stadiums or stockcar racing ones, using the ready prepared wickets flown in to the stadium.
Holding always maintained that some of the finest cricket he ever played in was in the World Series matches and Packer had done a great service to all test match cricketers.
