Take a line through the AFL. It was at loggerheads with its players for 18 months. For long stretches, they did not talk at all. Patrick Dangerfield said the players were mooting a strike.

As recently as last month, Melbourne president Glen Bartlett suggested the AFL bypass the players association and deal directly with the players. The bottom-line issue was revenue-sharing: the AFLPA wanted to introduce it, the AFL did not want a bar.

But a middle-ground deal has been done, minus crossed Ts and dotted Is. The players will get 28 per cent of the AFL's forecast revenue over the next five years, plus a mechanism to share in anything over and above. Everyone is happy, more or less. A big pie will do that.

It's always all about who gets how much of the pie. The trouble is that no one ever knows for sure how big it is, only that it will be bigger than the last pie. Some revenue streams, such as sponsorships and gate takings, fluctuate. But TV rights are fixed, and ever-growing, and because of that, the pie almost always grows.

Thus, by one estimate, Australia's cricketers made $100 million more out of their last CBA than predicted. The corollary, the Australian Cricketers Association would say, is that Cricket Australia's surplus was $300 million. That is the way revenue-sharing works. The way CA represents it is that no matter how much more the players already are making, 22.5 cents in every dollar of every junior registration fee henceforth still will go directly to them instead of being ploughed back into the grassroots.

Notionally, board and players would consent to a hybrid model like the AFL's, with some of the players' pool fixed, some scaled to the game's financial health. "The players are not necessarily saying revenue-share and nothing else," ACA chief executive Alastair Nicholson said on Wednesday. "It's this revenue-sharing model with flexibility underneath."

CA says if there is to be sharing, it should be in the game's profits, not its revenue.

But it runs deeper than that. Firstly, AFL players never have had revenue-sharing, so are missing nothing. Cricketers have had it for 20 years, and will accept scrapping it over their dead bodies. With it, they have had a seat in the running of the game, which they say they have exercised responsibly, for instance when donating $20 million of their own money to the welfare of past players. So this is a power struggle as much as a pay dispute.

What has changed in five years since the last deal is that CA's board has been streamlined and professionalised; that is, loaded with so-called business smarts.

Whether that is for better or worse depends on your attitude, for instance, to the Sheffield Shield. Structurally, it is Australian cricket's nursery. Financially, it is a drain. CA says shield cricketers already earn as much as NRL players, and want to leave it at that. The ACA says they should be paid on the same scale as internationals. David Warner said he would go to war for them, perhaps surprisingly. Then again, he has to look teammates in the eye.

A mirthless irony in this escalation for both AFL and CA is that players bodies once could not abide to be called "unions", but are now the mostly highly unionised workplaces in the country. This, CA is confronting, awkwardly.

In the PR battle, CA is lying low, figuring administrators have nothing to gain by antagonising players. That will change on Thursday when chief executive James Sutherland appears on ABC TV.

Players are heroes, but by most standards well paid already, and social media hints at only lukewarm support for their cause. Meantime, Ashes ticket sales are strong - day one at Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney already are sell-outs - suggesting the cricket public suspects bluff from both sides and that all will be well come November 23. It always has been before.

Five years ago, it came down to the last week. This time, the atmosphere is testier by far, the parties more intractable. For now, board and players can't agree to be in the same room, let alone on the same page.