The scars from the pay war between players and Cricket Australia (CA) will take a long time to heal, Test great Mitchell Johnson says.
As talks between CA and the Australian Cricketers' Association (ACA) continued on Wednesday, Johnson said the damage had already been done.
"Once it's all dealt with, I think the player-CA relationship is going to be a struggle," Johnson told reporters on Wednesday in Sydney.
"I think it's going to be very ordinary.
"Even if it gets sorted, the damage has already been done.
"There has been big personal insults thrown around about the players being greedy and those kinds of things, which is not the case, and much more.
"The damage has been done so the relationship is going to have to build again."
CA and the players' union resumed negotiations on Wednesday to try to break the impasse in the pay dispute.
The previous Memorandum of Understanding covering player wages expired on July 1, effectively leaving about 230 Australian cricketers unemployed.
The ACA and players subsequently pulled out of a scheduled Australia A tour of South Africa, steadfast in wanting to retain the revenue-sharing model of the past 20 years, while CA wanted to move to a fixed-revenue system.
Johnson feared CA and its chairman David Peever, a former Rio Tinto managing director, were trying to break the players' union.
"The players have fought so hard, the ACA, for the last 19 years, and got this module that we have in a really good place, and other things as well," the veteran of 73 Tests said.
"From the CA point of view, I know David Peever, ex-Rio Tinto ... no unions. So that is the thing that concerns me a lot.
"If we lose this battle as players, does then the ACA start getting their legs chopped from underneath them and the players lose the ACA?
"That is the scary thing from my point of view.
"Cricket will still go on but I don't know what sort of input the players will have in the future."
Johnson, speaking at the launch of BOWLFIT, a first-of-its-kind fitness training app for fast bowlers he co-founded with fitness expert Jock Campbell, said current players were disappointed at public slanging surrounding the stalemate.
"I saw Nathan Lyon this morning and I think he's as disappointed as everyone," he said.
"From what he was saying, they (CA and the ACA) are pretty close but then, over the weekend, something happened again.
"The way it has been dealt with in the media, it probably should have been more of a private matter ... it could have been dealt with very differently."
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