Brisbane, Apr 21 (IANS): Cricket Australia CEO Kevin Roberts defended the salary cuts of staff as he highlighted the precarious financial position the board is currently in due to the coronavirus pandemic.

With no cricket being played, boards across the world are staring at huge losses and Roberts stated pay cuts are necessary to keep CA financially stable.

"In pre-coronavirus world, we were already projecting that our cash and investments would reduce to about $40 million at the start of September this year," Roberts told journalists through video conferencing.

"The unfortunate reality of that is that we're estimating that we've taken a $20 million impact thus far. We have to anticipate that there will be more risks than that $20 million.

"If you contemplate the prospect of the international season, in particular, being affected, we have an issue of hundreds of millions of dollars on our hands," he added.

Australia are scheduled to host the T20 World Cup in October but it's fate is still not clear because of the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. So for them, the series against World No.1 Test team India not just holds massive importance on the field, but off the field as well.

"They (cash and investments) would bounce back very quickly by the start of the Indian Test series to about $100 million, which is approximately the amount of cash and investments we had at the end of March," Roberts said.