Todd Greenberg returns to his first love to run Australian cricket

For those who kvell (take pride) in the deeds of Australian Jewish athletes, it has been quite the year.

The canoe slalom Fox sisters – Jess and Noemie – with their Olympic gold medals, race walker Jemima Montag with her pair of bronze medals in Paris and Harry Sheezel, who after just two seasons, is already one of the best 30 players in the AFL.

But last week marked another significant achievement for Jewish sport in this country with Todd Greenberg’s appointment as the next chief executive of Cricket Australia.

There has been no shortage of Jews in positions of authority in Australian sport. Two generations of Lowy’s – Frank then Steven – have helmed football (soccer) in Australia. Frank saved the sport from self-immolating and Steven, with the wisdom of hindsight, might have been prematurely cast out.

Larry Kestleman rescued the National Basketball League and has grown it into one of the premier basketball competitions outside the United States. And various Jewish business and community leaders have sat on league boards and guided  leading clubs, in some cases nearly a century ago, for all the major football codes.

But Greenberg is different. These others held titular roles whereas Greenberg has made sports administration his living and it is doubtful that there is anyone in the country with a better CV.

The three biggest and most powerful sports in this country are Australian Rules football, rugby league and cricket, and Greenberg, who was chief executive of the NRL between 2016 and 2020, will be the first to have sat in the big chair for two of them (though David Gallop was CEO of the NRL and Football Federation Australia, and John O’Neill headed Rugby Australia and then the FFA).

You never know. Cricket Australia is based in Melbourne and Greenberg, a lifelong Sydneysider, will need to make the move. AFL boss Andrew Dillon might want to be careful.

Greenberg got his start at Cricket New South Wales in the mid 1990s but his first major role was as the general manager of Stadium Australia (now Accor Stadium) from 2001-08 when it was repurposed after the Sydney Olympics.

He then moved into rugby league, first as chief executive of the Canterbury Bulldogs for five years, where he once joked that he was the “most popular Jew in Lakemba”, then head of football at the NRL before becoming the CEO.

He received mixed grades for his stint as the supremo of rugby league. He took steps to curb some of the infamous behaviour of a few miscreant players and solidified some of the commercial foundations underpinning the code. But in the eyes of some observers, he failed to curb the rampant creep of the AFL through the rugby league heartland of suburban Sydney and southeast Queensland.

He finished up at the NRL in April 2020, sacked or resigned, depending on who you believe, but he was never long for the job once the pugnacious horse-racing administrator Peter V’Landys took control of the sport.

Good thing for Greenberg was that he had a fallback. Cricket was always his first love.

He played first grade in Sydney for Randwick, having cut his teeth through Maccabi, and he twice represented Australia at cricket at the Maccabiah.

His Maccabiah teammates remember him as a stylish batsman on the pitches of Ashdod, although his best cricket for Maccabi might have been in some of the super-competitive Senior Carnival matches for NSW against Victoria. Those who were there still rave about a century he once made for his state against a souped-up Victorian attack at North Sydney Oval.

He became chief executive of the Australian Cricketers Association in 2021 and quickly earned the respect of the playing cohort.

He had to walk a difficult line in late 2023 as the death toll in Gaza post-October 7 started to grow. The International Cricket Council forbade Australian Test batsman Usman Khawaja from wearing boots adorned with the phrases “all lives are equal” and “freedom is a human right”, a nod to his pro-Palestinian outlook.

As head of the ACA, Greenberg threw his full public support behind Khawaja, telling radio broadcaster SEN, “If he wants to push a particular cause, then we’ll support him. We want our athletes to be heroes. We want people to look up to them.

“And to do that, we need them to be authentic and we need them to be that regularly and consistently, not just on the simple issues, but maybe more importantly, on the more difficult ones.”

At the same time, Greenberg was able to privately assuage the fears of several fellow Jewish cricket identities, who feared that their sport was going to openly take a side on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

“He’s a good operator,” one of them told The Jewish Independent.

Greenberg will take over at CA at the end the summer. He will have plenty on his plate, starting with the massive task of getting the Australian Test team back on side with the fans, who often find the team to be aloof and at times, lacking self-awareness.

Overdue generational change is coming to the Test team with a massive home Ashes series against England next summer, while he must manage the growing divide between traditional forms of cricket and the T20 game. There is also the relationship with India, which now controls the global game.

He replaces Nick Hockley, a British sports administrator who is also Jewish. Hockley just happened to be the right man at the right time when he got the job, but for Greenberg, this is a role he has been coveting and preparing for his entire professional life - and in the eyes of many, one that will suit him perfectly.