Muddled messaging adds fuel to fire in Paine sexting saga

Tim Paine was cleared by Cricket Australia’s integrity unit. Picture: Chris Kidd

How do you turn a setback into a crisis? One way, it would seem, is to leave it with the board of Cricket Australia.

A week ago, the organisation was basking in the glory of a global trophy wrested by a plucky team. But CA chairman Richard Freudenstein’s performance in the tawdry l’affaire Paine is recalling that line of Ford Prefect’s in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: “You go to pieces so fast, people get hit by the shrapnel.”

One man can be pardoned a rueful chuckle. That’s Freudenstein’s predecessor Earl Eddings, unceremoniously ousted five weeks ago.

Turns out that his detractors in NSW and Queensland did him a favour.

If not for them, it would have been Eddings trying to explain how the board, of which he was then deputy chair, decided in the first instance to take no action against Tim Paine, rather than Freudenstein presenting the whole thing as a stuff-up he innocently inherited.

Freudenstein spoke of 2018 on Saturday as though it was 1918, an ancient time “involving lots of context I’m not aware of” before the inevitable march of enlightened ideas – an age of ignorance before we understood that blunderingly puerile text messages were an act of lascivious depravity that would have shamed Bluebeard.

“I can’t talk about the 2018 ­decision,” Freudenstein argued. “I wasn’t there. I’m not sure of all the circumstances that took place.’

But would it be so difficult to find out? After all, two of Eddings’ colleagues from that board endure, John Harnden and Michelle Tredenick.

Nor is the trend of public opinion, about which CA seems ceaselessly anxious, entirely clear or monolithic on Paine’s offence. On Friday the name that trended on Twitter was not Tim Paine but, perhaps nostalgically, Shane Warne.

Nor are sports fans, generally, so prim. We in the media often say: oh, but the public build up their heroes so. Actually, that’s classic transference. If anyone does the building up, it’s us.

And not that I’m saying it’s right or anything like that but, goodness knows, an NRL player’s first dick pic is almost a rite of passage.

Anyway, let’s lay it out simply. In 2018, CA’s integrity chief Sean Carroll investigated an allegation of historic inappropriate behaviour by Australia’s newly appointed captain Tim Paine. Paine co-operated fully.

The complainant declined to do so when CA would not meet her requests for money.

On the basis that his behaviour appeared part of a consensual ­exchange, Carroll found no misconduct.

Now, we’re all familiar with the genre of the investigation by a sporting body designed to contain damage and arrive at foreordained outcomes – CA did one of those after Sandpapergate.

But Freudenstein calls the investigation “thorough”, and ex-cop Carroll was renownedly pretty tough; there was a related investigation by the human resources department at Cricket Tasmania, which drew similar conclusions. The CA board agreed.

Freudenstein now says that this decision “sent the wrong message to the sport, to the community, and to Tim – that this kind of behaviour is acceptable and without serious consequences”.

This is, of course, nonsense, because no message of any kind was sent to cricket or the community, and Paine hardly left the experience thinking that his behaviour was acceptable and inconsequential – we know that he was, quite rightly, mortified by his stupidity and vulgarity, felt foolish and contrite, has been exemplary since, and seems to have worked through the ensuing marital rift. The privacy helped that. Which, surely, is a good thing.

Freudenstein now claims that on “the facts as they are today”, CA would take a different ­attitude.

But this makes no sense, either. No new fact has emerged or been sought. No changes have been made to the code of conduct. So presumably the integrity unit would return the same finding.

If it is now the case that the board is overriding the integrity unit, and should have done so in 2018, then that is also odd.

Two years ago, Carroll slapped a 12-month suspension on a female player, Emily Smith of the Hobart Hurricanes, for the mis­demeanour of posting an image of her team’s batting line-up on ­Instagram.

When protests were raised, CA’s stance was that the integrity unit was entirely autonomous, and that the board had no power to review its decisions.

Freudenstein’s remarks might, then, lead one to the conclusion that the code of conduct is no longer fit for purpose – except that he explicitly denied this on Saturday, and said he foresaw no need to amend it.

So one is left with two entwined possibilities: that the board has updated its expectations of Australian captains, so that everything they have ever said or done could be subject to review at any time, or applies a different code in the event of tabloid exposure.

Seriously? If 2018 mistakes are now to be judged by these newly enlightened 2021 standards, there’s an argument Harnden and Tredenick should join Paine under the bus, except that there may not now be room.

Sooner or later that Jolimont body pile will grow impassable to public transport.

Look, perhaps we should not be too harsh. After all, it’s not difficult to follow the thought processes of the decision makers.

In 2018, when the issue first came to board level, directors were still rending their garments over Sandpapergate.

They had just suspended an Australian skipper and his deputy; they had parted with a coach; a CEO was on his way out; so, though he did not know it, was a chairman.

Flux hardly describes the situation. So the tabling of a report that recommended no further action against their fledgling captain would have been seized on with relief.

Then along comes 2021, when we’re all a bit jumpier, and all a tad more performative of our right-on credentials. After all, CA has just cancelled a Test against ­Afghanistan because of the Taliban’s position on female participation in sport. Wonder what the sharia punishment is for dick pics, by the way ….

But there’s something clumsy and self-protecting about CA’s haste here, which involved a board meeting even before the publication of the stories about Paine, with their seedy mix of innuendo, sexual harassment and revenge porn.

Freudenstein said on Saturday that Paine had “come to the view” he should resign, and the board “feel his resignation was appropriate”. Would the board have backed Paine had he not resigned? That, countered Freudenstein, was a “hypothetical question”.

There’s a lazy presumption that hypothetical questions need not be answered. You can answer them, of course, if you want to. Freudenstein simply didn’t.

So let’s be frank: Paine was in the position of the disgraced ­officer left in a locked room with a revolver in the drawer and an ­expectation he would know what to do.

Freudenstein concluded his statement on Saturday: “The role of Australia captain must be held to the highest standards.”

In addition to being a train wreck of a sentence – “Australia captain”?; “the role … must be held”? – it left the standards themselves disconcertingly unclear and open to revision.

There were “lessons to be learnt”, claimed the chairman. Sure. But on recent indications, one would not bet money on CA’s working out what they are.