Sydney: Australian Cricketers Association (ACA) chief executive Paul Marsh said a strike is the last option and the players would prefer to roll the existing pay agreement forward if a deal is not finalised by the end of the month.

ACA and Cricket Australia have failed to resolve the issue of the players' payment.

"That sort of stuff (a strike) is always an absolute last resort," Marsh was quoted as saying on ABC Radio.

"I think our preferred method here, and I don't know what Cricket Australia's position is, but our preferred strategy would be to keep rolling the current deal until we can reach an agreement. Nobody wants a situation where the players aren't playing. But I guess it takes two to tango," he said.

Marsh said when the story has come from over the weekend, the question was put to us are you preparing for a boycott or strike action we're preparing for everything. We're not going to get to the 30th of June and say we haven't got a deal, what do we do now? Our job is to make sure when that time comes, hopefully we have got a deal, that's our absolute priority, but if we haven't then we've got to be able to talk different options. Obviously we'll take those options back to the collective player group and we'll make a decision from there."

"Cricket Australia pretty late in the piece have come to us and tried to take a couple of revenue streams out of that definition as well as turning one from what currently now a gross revenue definition into a net revenue definition," Marsh said.

"The amount of money at stake is pretty significant and I think for very reasonable reasons we're not agreeing to that. At the moment it's a little bit of a stalemate on that particular issue.

"If you have a look at what players from a lot of the overseas type sports get it's up over 50%. So we're pretty reasonable in terms of what we're asking for. If Cricket Australia want to start to unbundle all the revenue streams and say we don't want you to have this one now ... then we quite rightly should turn around and say we want more of the high-margin revenue streams," he said. (IANS)