ERST LESEN! » s all without mentioning the Sheffield Shie

SASKATOON - After being swept in the first round of the Western Hockey League playoffs, many questioned whether the host Saskatoon Blades even belonged at the MasterCard Memorial Cup. They emphatically put those doubts rest with a gritty win over the Canadian Hockey Leagues top team. Matej Stransky scored twice and Andrey Makarov made 29 saves as Saskatoon picked up its first victory in more than two months by beating the star-studded Halifax Mooseheads 5-2 on Sunday night. "Theres a lot of doubt in this city, or there was, going into tonight and they had every reason to," Blades centre Lukas Sutter said. "We had to do something to spark some belief and excitement." The Blades did just that against a team whose roster includes top NHL prospects Nathan MacKinnon and Jonathan Drouin. Collin Valcourt, Darren Dietz and Josh Nicholls, into an empty net, had the other goals for Saskatoon (1-1), which dropped a hard-fought 3-2 decision to the London Knights in Fridays tournament opener, but held on against the CHLs No. 1 ranked team. "Weve never had doubt in that room and I think we needed a game like this to show the fans and the whole city that they can get behind us and have something to feel confident about," said Nicholls, who also had an assist. "I think (the Credit Union Centre) was the loudest its been in my five years here." Stephen MacAulay and MacKinnon replied in the third period for Halifax (1-1), which lost just six games during the regular season and once in the playoffs while cruising to the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League title. Zachary Fucale made 26 stops in defeat. With the Mooseheads down 1-0 and pressing for the tie late in the second period, Stransky collected a loose puck after coming out of the penalty box. The Dallas Stars prospect moved in alone on Fucale and roofed a shot under the crossbar with 1:15 left to help send Saskatoon, which hadnt played in 51 days prior to the game against London, to its first win since a 3-2 shootout decision over the Edmonton Oil Kings on March 12. "Its been a while since weve had that win. Its been over 60 days since weve won a hockey game," said Blades defenceman Duncan Siemens, whose team will meet the Portland Winterhawks in Wednesdays round-robin finale of the tournament to decide the CHL champion. "Its been a long time and it feels great to get that one, but were not satisfied." Halifax, which was playing its second game in as many nights after Saturdays 7-4 victory over Portland, was thwarted time and again by Makarov. A Russian netminder who is property of the Buffalo Sabres, Makarov stopped MacKinnon early in the second off the rush with Saskatoon up 1-0 and made a big save on Halifaxs Stefan Fournier eight minutes into the period. While Makarov was brilliant, he got a lot of help from his teammates, who blocked shots with reckless abandon, especially on the power play before Stranskys second goal. "I thought they outworked us for the majority of the game," said MacKinnon, whose team lost for just the eighth time in regulation all season. "I thought we had a good last 10-12 minutes to the night but thats not enough and weve got to regroup. "We dont like the feeling (of losing) but well handle it like men and pros and move on." Valcourt made it 3-0 just 1:43 into the third, banging a puck home off a scramble in front of Fucale before Dietz scored another one from in tight on the power play just 57 seconds later. "They played with more energy than us and desperation," Mooseheads coach Dominique Ducharme said. "They felt their back maybe a little bit more to the wall and they reacted. Youve got to give them credit. They battled hard. "You look at the goals that were scored. Three of them are battles in front of the net for loose pucks or rebounds." MacAulay got Halifax on the board by ripping a shot past Makarov at 6:48 of the third before MacKinnon added his fourth of the tournament at 8:19. The Mooseheads pressed for more, but couldnt find another way past Makarov before Nicholls iced it with two seconds to go. The Blades led 1-0 after an exciting first period that featured five combined power plays, good chances at both ends and a couple of hard hits. Saskatoon opened the scoring at 12:11 when Stransky jammed a loose puck past Fucale after the Mooseheads goalie failed to control a rebound in his crease. Nicholls, who is in the final days of his junior career, summed up the emotion in the Blades locker-room after a victory that was a long time coming. "Today is one of the best feelings I think all of us have had in playing the game of hockey," Nicholls said. "I think we were just all together as a group. Each guy was on the same page and we were all pushing each other on that bench to gain some energy. At no point did we fatigue at all. We kept pushing each other and charging each others batteries." Notes: MacKinnon is ranked as the No. 2 North American skater ahead of next months NHL draft, while Drouin is No. 3. ... Attendance was 8,934. ... Portland (0-1) meets London (1-0) in Mondays game. Next up for Halifax is a date with the Knights on Tuesday. If necessary, a tiebreaker would be played Thursday. The semifinal between the second- and third-place teams goes Friday, with the first-place club getting a bye directly into Sundays final. ... The Memorial Cup was first awarded in 1919 in honour of the soldiers killed in the First World War. It now recognizes Canadian soldiers killed in any conflict after being rededicated in 2010. Marshall Faulk Rams Jersey . -- Jimmy Walkers first PGA Tour trophy came with a special gift tucked inside. Eric Dickerson Jersey . 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It lasts all of 28 seconds, long enough for the ACB chief executive Malcolm Speed to declare: Weve considered your proposal. We believe it is unacceptable. We reject it and see no further point in discussing it.December 19, 2016. Another meeting between the ACA and what is now Cricket Australia (CA). The ACAs delegation, led by its chief executive, Alistair Nicholson, arrives at CAs Jolimont headquarters for a meeting to be held in the boardroom. Upon arrival, they are told that talks have been suspended, amid accusations that the players union has failed to negotiate in good faith. There are no minutes or finish time recorded for a meeting that never even takes place.How, then, did we get to this point, the first total breakdown of talks between the board and the players since that springtime meeting 19 years ago?Certainly the issues around womens contractual conditions have been the flashpoint, leaving CAs chief executive James Sutherland and head of team performance Pat Howard to angrily assert the legality of clauses around pregnancy in particular. Claim and counterclaim, leak and counter-leak.But there is something far deeper at play here. The suspension of talks for the first time since 1997 is highly portentous, because it points to the fact that CA, as outlined by the submission relayed to the players last week, is trying to make the most sweeping changes to the board-player relationship since the ACA was formed.A long-standing partnership, based around a fixed revenue percentage for the players and an annual grant to fund the ACA, is openly being brought into question by the board. For most of the past two decades, the matter at hand between CA and the ACA has been, How do we reach a deal? This time around, CAs query is more like: Why do we need to deal with you at all?It is fair to surmise that this question first began to be raised in earnest when CAs board was overturned completely in October 2012, changing from 14 state association representatives to nine independent directors, many with strong corporate backgrounds. Two of the independent directors were David Peever, the former managing director of Rio Tinto in Australia, and Kevin Roberts, former global senior vice-president of Adidas, the corporate saviour of the outdoors brand Colorado, and latterly CEO of his own company, 2XU. Peever was by his own admission a modest club cricketer; Roberts was accomplished enough to have made two centuries for New South Wales.The current MOU between the players and the board had been struck earlier in 2012, before either Peever or Roberts arrived. It was largely a continuation of previous agreements, with added clauses around T20 and also some form of performance bonus payments, off the back of recommendations inked into the Argus review of 2011. Howard, less than six months into his job, had been a major negotiator for CA; Paul Marsh, nearly a decade into his role as ACA chief, led the way for the players.Marsh had always been known for speaking his mind in public but at the same time maintaining relationships behind the scenes that allowed negotiations to continue fruitfully - not once during his time did the two parties find themselves unable to speak to one another. Marsh was a key player alongside Howard, Sutherland and the players in deliberations over replacing Mickey Arthur with Darren Lehmann.But that sort of partnership, while familiar to Sutherland, is anathema to the likes of Peever, who, in the same year he joined the board, spoke bluntly at a mining conference about the employer-employee relationship. Direct engagement between companies and employees, flexibility and the need for improved productivity has to be at the heart of the system, he said at the time. Only then can productivity and innovation be liberated from the shop floor up, and without the competing agenda of a third party constantly seeking to extend its reach into areas best left to management. The ACA, then, is not seen as a partner but an outside meddler.Another factor in CAs thinking is the success in changing the financial model for the states. Also in 2012, the board moved away from an outmoded equal share of revenue to each state, offset by the gate receipts for larger centres, to a more strategic model that guarantees a minimum amount for each state and leaves the upside in CAs hands for strategic investments. That change was successfully pushed through six often irascible state associations; the ACA may look like small beer by comparison.There have been times in the recent past that the ACA has not helped itself, espousing views that have sounded either reactionary or just plain wrong. A proposal for the Big Bash League be played in October, outside school holidays, was never likely to get far, nor president Greg Dyers suggestion that 2016 - five years in - was the time to introduce private ownership to the BBL.dddddddddddd. Some of the ACAs scepticism about day-night Tests has also proved too alarmist by half. More than once, CA directors and management have styled the players union as the opposition party.Undoubtedly that is the impression CA has tried to give to the ACA. Ever since Nicholson arrived to replace Marsh in late 2014, he has been kept at arms length from the top tier of CA - spending very little time with Peever or Sutherland and having most of his conversations with either Howard or the head of cricket operations, Sean Cary. Whether this was Sutherlands idea or Peevers is not clear, but it has created a distance that, with the addition of the need for detailed and robust MOU discussions, has now become frostiness.As a counterbalance to the awkwardness created by Howards role in 2012, when the players were confused as to how the man appointed to help them perform could be playing hardball on contracts, Roberts has stepped in as CAs lead negotiator, having left the board to join management last year. Not surprisingly given his previously stated positions on industrial relations, Peever has been more involved than any CA chairman since Denis Rogers back in 1997-98. He has even retained the services of an advisor - the former Industrial Relations Commissioner Ken Bacon. Peevers involvement is yet another subplot to it all, for it means that Roberts has a chance to deliver an MOU for the chairman that would help expedite his own elevation - as is widely expected in the future - to replace Sutherland as chief executive. It should not be forgotten that Sutherland himself gained his Jolimont spurs in taking on much the same role, earning the trust of Speed by working successfully with the ACAs then-chief Tim May.Over his time working with the ACA, Sutherland can best be described as a pragmatist. In the 2007 book on the boards history, Inside Story, Sutherland described his concept of the board-player accord thusly: My view of the MOU is that there are four or five issues you cant really resolve. So what you do is trade them off. Later in the book he actually mounts quite a persuasive case for the retention of the revenue sharing model:Sometimes theres a feeling around the place that it wouldnt be a bad thing to break away from that share of revenue. Personally I think its now too difficult. I also think it has a lot of benefits. It makes it clear what the players can and cant do, and its simple to understand. CAs present reasoning behind breaking up the model seems to be based around the need to free up more cash to be spent at the grass roots of the game - an old echo of the idea that greedy elite players are robbing their counterparts down the chain. Yet there was plenty in the boards submission that did not stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny. The assertion that only the top 20 CA-contracted players, not domestic players or women, deserve to share in a fixed revenue percentage is difficult to comprehend.International men are amongst the highest-paid sportsmen in Australia and CA believes this should remain the case in the future, the board argued in its submission. CA believes the players who contribute to financial returns should continue to share in those financial returns. CA believes retainers for international men should increase significantly compared to the retainers that were agreed on in the current MOU.Yet it is undeniable that through the BBL and now the WBBL, both attracting enormous interest from commercial broadcasters, domestic and female players are contributing more to the financial value of Australian cricket than at any other time in the games history. Even before the BBL began, many of its start-up costs were bankrolled by domestic players taking part in the much-maligned Champions League T20.And this is all without mentioning the Sheffield Shield, the breeding ground in which all those players who contribute to financial returns are developed. Unless CA is keeping much of its programme at the National Cricket Centre in Brisbane a closely guarded secret, it is not yet possible to grow a fully formed international cricketer out of a board-approved test tube.So it is clear that CA and the ACA are as far apart in their core positions as at any time since the players first banded together in 1997. Around the time that it was formed, one senior player retorted to a question about the strength derived through collective bargaining via the union with the words its not a f***ing union. Whether the current generation likes it or not, a bullish CA has identified the ACA as such. The question now is how much the players are prepared to fight to keep it. ' ' '