WA Cricket chief executive Christina Matthews says her organisation will lose up to $5 million after Perth was stripped of the fifth Ashes Test, but she hopes Cricket Australia will help soften the blow with a financial compensation.
Optus Stadium will no longer host the fifth Ashes Test and the race is now on to see which city will be awarded the match.
Matthews says losing the Test was a big financial hit to WA Cricket and she'll be asking CA for compensation.
"We're talking (a loss of) between three to five million dollars, which is all our members' fees," Matthews said.
"We still get our grant from Cricket Australia for international cricket, but our business model is based on members.
"If there's a financial advantage in allocating that fifth Test to a particular state, we expect to receive some of that financial advantage to compensate for what we've lost.
"I'd hope we'd recover 50 per cent."
Matthews said the size of the broadcast team proved to be the major stumbling block to Perth hosting an Ashes Test this summer.
"And not just the broadcasters in Fox and Seven - there's also Hawkeye, there's Spidercam and there's DRS that only have a certain specialist group of people who follow it all around the country," Matthews said.
"They can't get here any earlier than the players. When they come to do their job, they've got to go in and out of the public areas.
"So there's things that can't be kept away from the public and that wasn't fully known until about 10 days ago.
"I don't think we dropped the ball, but maybe we needed to dig a bit deeper into things Cricket Australia need to tell the government.
"I'm really cranky about the fact it's the second year in a row we're missing a Test, but there's really no one to blame which makes it really hard. It's just circumstances."
Perth is scheduled to host a one-dayer between Australia and NZ on January 30.
Even if WA's border doesn't open before then, Matthews is still hopeful that match will go ahead given the demands are much less than that of a Test match.
But the Perth Scorchers' hopes of hosting a block of BBL games at Optus Stadium appear slim.
The Scorchers open their season at home against Brisbane Heat on Wednesday and are then due to host the Hobart Hurricanes on December 20.
But a December 22 fixture in Melbourne against the Renegades could turn the Scorchers into a team too 'dirty' to be able to play more matches in Perth beyond that.
WA Cricket will put forward a proposal requesting any Scorchers' games in COVID-ravaged Melbourne be moved elsewhere.
Australian Associated Press
