Cricket: Australian players to boycott 'A' tour of South Africa

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia's players will boycott an "A" team tour of South Africa later this month unless a new pay deal is struck with Cricket Australia beforehand, the Australian Cricketers' Association (ACA) said on Sunday.

An emergency meeting of players in a Sydney hotel on Sunday decided that those selected for the Australia "A" tour of South Africa would gather in Brisbane on Monday but only travel if a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was agreed.

The previous MOU expired at midnight on Friday, leaving around 230 leading cricketers uncontracted and the fate of future tours in limbo.

"They don't intend to tour but the reality is they don't fly out of the country until Friday," ACA chief executive Alistair Nicholson told a news conference after the meeting.

"So the players are going to go into camp as planned and hopefully we can make some progress with regards to the MOU. There would need to be a significant breakthrough on the key issue of the revenue sharing model."

At the heart of the acrimonious dispute is Cricket Australia's insistence that the two-decade-old model, under which players get a fixed percentage of revenue, should be jettisoned.

CA believes the revenue-share model is unfit for modern times and is starving grass-roots cricket of funding, while players say it has underpinned the game's growth and prosperity over the past 20 years.

(Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Peter Rutherford)