Tim Paine’s real ‘crime’ is getting caught out

Australian cricketers have normal human appetites and weaknesses; they’ve performed great deeds on the field and done stupid things off it.

Tim Paine stepped down as Australian men's Test captain in Hobart. Picture: Chris Kidd

The great Yankees and Mets manager Casey Stengel was once asked that perennial question: did a player having sex ahead of a game impair athletic performance? No, he replied: the problems arose when a player went looking for sex.

If not perhaps in quite the way Stengel imagined it, Tim Paine now understands this to be true. The night before and morning of a Brisbane Test four years ago, Paine was nowhere near the object of his ardour, but his phone provided a point of connection, for an itch better left unscratched.

Life went on, until more significant scratchings, in Cape Town in 2018. This turned Paine from a horny wicketkeeper into an upstanding captain — a Mr Clean, in fact, abruptly tasked with distancing Australian cricket from its gravest public relations disaster.

The board of Cricket Australia was unaware of Paine’s private peccadillos at the time of his appointment, but learned of them soon after, thanks to a complaint by the co-respondent, an employee of Cricket Tasmania.

Two investigations deemed the matter private, and not to infringe the complex codes of conduct that contemporary cricketers are required to observe. Paine proved, as we know, a sound choice — one on which CA regularly congratulated itself.

Now Paine’s prior indiscretion has reached out and tapped him on the shoulder, for reasons that will probably grow clearer as more emerges, but may not be unconnected to money.

Tim Paine and his wife Bonnie. Picture: Instagram

Paine’s embarrassment is, obviously, acute; so will be that of his family, on Friday unseen, but, no doubt, privately suffering. Yet CA’s board has effectively chosen to add to their mortification, because to do otherwise is to endanger its corporate reputation — the reputation Paine helped hugely to rebuild.

“On reflection,” Paine said sorrowfully on Friday, “my actions in 2017 do not meet the standards of an Australian cricket captain — or the wider community.”

But, of course, Paine was not captain in 2017. He had barely rejoined the team, having flirted with retirement before flirting with anyone else.

And, y’know, about that wider community.

After all, the last few years have hardly been a vintage period for exemplary behaviour in public life by anyone.

Premiers have brazenly routinely flouted declarations of interests. Government ministers have ridden out affairs with staffers.

After his, the deputy prime minister served no more than a token period on the sidelines before blustering back to power.

Politicians were outraged by ball-tampering in 2018. This kind, not so much.

On one level, it feels like we have reverted to the attitudes of July 2000 when Shane Warne lost the vice-captaincy for a not-dissimilar escapade when he was not representing Australia, not even in Australia, and that had nothing to do with the discharge of his cricket responsibilities.

Within ten years, this had become a subject of ribald humour. “This shit is addictive/Thank God for predictive,” sang Eddie Perfect in Shane Warne: The Musical. ‘Sex is the best thing but next best is texting/What an SMS I’m in….”

But maybe it’s not the moral climate that has changed so much as the workplace climate, which is vastly more sensitive; what used to pass even between consenting adults no longer does. Sandpapergate, too, has left Australian cricket brittle, paranoid and reactive.

Perhaps, too, there are factors of which we are unaware, contexts to which we are not privy. Who knew what when is always worth knowing.

Still, one wonders what point codes of conduct serve if their parameters only apply when subjects are confidential, and if their conclusions can be, effectively, retrospectively voided.

The observation is open that what matters is not getting caught, and not thereby tarnishing the brand. Which is an attitude that leads to more cynicism, not less; it looks silly, not serious.

Let’s be honest. Australian cricketers have, since time immemorial, had normal human appetites and standard human weaknesses. They’ve performed great deeds on the cricket field; they’ve done stupid, impetuous, indiscreet things off it; they’ve left behind a lot of first wives too.

Seriously, imagine Keith Miller in the age of SMS. Great character that he was, you’d hardly have wanted to know about the pics on his phone.

Another line of Stengel’s comes to mind: “When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed. When you’re older you get credit for virtues you never possessed.”

In Paine’s case, this has perhaps been reversed.

He can console himself with the great manager’s conclusion: “It evens itself out.”