sold a pup and Pup out of a job?

Aghastee's,

On the face if it, it seems the Seven Network has been sold a pup, and Pup is out of a job.
Hang on, maybe not...

The only thing for certain is that Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer would be revolving in his grave, screaming the foulest of obscenities.
So, was World Series Cricket all for naught?
You may remember 30 May 1979, when Packer won The Great Schism which ended after a long legal battle in complete & utter capitulation by the then Australian Cricket Board.....Nine got the TV rights for ten years, and the ABC was brushed forever.
Back then, cricket fans were simply horrified that television advertisements would intrude on the sanctity that is Test Cricket, never mind that almost 40 years later, Packer's greatest invention...one-day cricket...would be hived off to pay TV.
That's no great loss to the genuine student of the game, but Kezza would be absolutely furious.
After paying a poultice for the tennis, Nine were very clever to bid up the price to the point where they knew Seven would fork out a king's ransom to hold a very expensive baby, while Ten weren't even in the game.
Seven is keeping the domestic Test Matches on live-to-air as a sop to the anti-siphoning legislation [which they still have to get around for the one-day internationals].
It's fairly clear to those who have an interest in the media landscape that Seven will run a hefty loss on those, and hope for handsome profits on no less than 43 Big Bash League matches.
Forty-three! "More than ever before!" trumpets Cricket Australia.
Christ Almighty, they'll be playing day and night every day for weeks.
Forget the theme tune to Nine's Wonderful Wide World of Sport, let's be blunt here, the so-called "Sound of Summer" is long gone, with The Goanna, and Tony G and then The Benood, all dead.
Is Keith Stackpole still alive? [yep, 77, he is].
Why not bring him back?

Which brings us to the vexed question of who's in and who's out of the commentary team.
It is quite sick-making to think that Seven Network boss-cocky, Tim Worner - a filthy self-confessed adulterer, cad and bounder who's wasted far too much of Seven's money being in court for far too long in recent times, and resigned in disgrace from the Swans board - has the final say on this one.
The fool knows nothing of cricket.
Noted with dismay in the weekend fishwraps, that Grubby Worner is seriously considering personally bringing back a retired football caller in the form of 69-year-old Dennis "Centimetre Perfect" Cometti.
Now that's thinking outside the box, not.
The last time Cometti called cricket, Alan McGilvray was in the commentary box, and he's been dead 21 years.
Mark Nicholas is the first one out of a job because he only got it in the first place as he was KFB Packer's "go-to" and fix-it" man whenever he was in London - anything Kerry wanted, Nicholas could provide.
81-year-old Bill Lawry only really retains an interest in racing pigeons for serious money, Chappelli, Tubby and Heals are all Nine men through and through and know no other television culture, while Warnie is, well, just Warnie.
MJ Clarke can say some insightful things on the telly, but that high squeaky voice is hard on the hearing, and he is unpopular with the Australian general public, so it's something of a surprise that Pup is currently calling the IPL on Indian TV, along with Slatts, so on that evidence alone, they're in with half a chance of being re-employed.
Thank the Good Lord Joisus that that pompous pommy prick Michael Vaughan is instantly out of work, and the less said about that obnoxious gormless god-awful serial pest KP Pietersen, the better.
By some reports, James Brayshaw is good for a gig, but where's Greg "Long Donger" Matthews when you need him?
Mo's brief stint at radio commentary was excellent; he has a cricket brain as big as a watermelon, speaks his mind eloquently, and he's the man you really want when the going gets weird.
Stuart MacGill had a go at it once on TV and once on radio, but he ended up writing cook books instead and decided to continue on unabated with what some folk in cricket circles cruelly described as his "red obsession" - uninterested in beer - the wine aficionado was also considered a bit left-field because he openly confessed to reading books on tour.
Magilla the Gorilla was also a first-class arguer with Umpires, took the moral high ground against both Robert Mugabe and Kentucky Fried Chicken, didn't mind taking CA to court for $2.6M in back pay, and only recently described the selectors as "morons" for picking Tim Paine.
What more do you want in a television commentator?
Oh, where are they now?

But all that's by-the-by.
Nine still has the rights to the next Ashes in England, and various upcoming World Cups etc, entirely confusing the ordinary sensible punter who won't know which channel to watch.
Check yr local guides....but in any case, as the Foxtel people will tell you, television is dead anyway, and the future is all about "streaming"...why watch the cricket on a 65" flat-screen, when you can now view it on a 4.5 inch screen on yr telephone!?
Gee whizz, reminds me of the time after the advent of colour TV, when people used to take their new portable battery operated black and white telly's to the beach with them.
But lets get down to tin tacks here..."show me the money".
CA did very well indeed to flog the rights for $A1.182B over six-years.
Which begs the question - where does all that cash go?
My Spy at The Ground noted that at the same time the list of centrally contracted players for 2018-19 was very quietly released, which unsurprisingly did not include Smiffy, Burbs or Bonkers, who've been paid off to keep quiet.
Here's the stellar top 20 cricketers in Australia, right here, right now:

Ashton Agar, Alex Carey, Pat Cummins, Aaron Finch, Peter Handscomb, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Usman Khawaja, Nathan Lyon, Glenn Maxwell, Shaun Marsh, Mitchell Marsh, Tim Paine, Matt Renshaw, Jhye Richardson, Kane Richardson, Billy Stanlake, Mitchell Starc, Marcus Stoinis, Andrew Tye.

Sheesh...a mob of world-beaters there, and playing "Pick the Captain" out of that motley lot will be like trying to pin the tail on the donkey.
What central contracts are worth is now for some reason "confidential", but at last count the top 20 get a minimum of $900,000 each [the skipper gets a premium that pushes him well over a mill], so that's roughly $18 million a year, or $108 million over the six years in central contract money.
That's chicken feed, in relative terms.
There goes all of Packer's promises to pay professionals properly.
Never mind last years protracted "pay war" which, after the industrial action of striking for the Australia "A" tour of South Africa, was appalling handled and botched by one J.Sutherland - the players said they came away with "a better revenue-sharing deal".
Really?
For sake of argument, let's leave out the match payments and bonuses, they've settled for contracts that are worth 9.13% of the TV revenue.
So where exactly does the other 90+% go?
There's no question that the powers-that-be, the boss cocky's, head honcho's, top banana's, grand poo bah's, big kahuna's and the vast legions of hangers-on down at Cricket Australia HQ are paying themselves handsomely rather than spending it on fuzzy intangible things like 'grass roots' cricket, of course middle management would be bloated to simply outrageous proportions, and the size of CA's media department alone surely must rival the almost 100 press officer's employed by the AFL.
Staff to burn and, now, the number of in-house lawyers at CA would be staggering.

The upshot is there will still be at least two competing live radio networks [you'd hope - how much are the radio rights worth at the minute? Jack Shit?], One-Day Internationals and T20's can go to hell in a handbasket behind a paywall as far as the purists are concerned, and in the final paralysis, there will be nothing for it but to actually go to the ground and start barracking, drunkenly.