Our Tim has what it takes

EDITORIAL: TIM Paine is one of the best news stories to emerge from any sport in recent times.

Australian Test captain Tim Paine.

TIM Paine is one of the best news stories to emerge from any sport in recent times. Two years ago he was playing grade cricket for University in the Hobart suburbs, unable to break back into the state side. His time playing at the professional level, the 31-year-old had decided, was up. He’d made the choice to quit for the security of a sales rep job based in Melbourne. His wife Bonnie had even been over to start looking for somewhere to live.

Then the phone rang. It was an Australian selector, former captain Greg Chappell. “Don’t quit,” Chappell told Paine. “We might have some plans for you.”

Paine was soon selected to play the first Ashes Test against England. By the end of the summer he had found himself the nation’s first-choice wicketkeeper in all three forms of the game.

But this story still had some chapters to be written. And it wasn’t until the nightmare in South Africa in March this year that Paine’s already remarkable redemption story became legend. As the ball-tampering (cheating) scandal claimed the scalps of captain Steve Smith, vice-captain David Warner and opener Cameron Bancroft, Cricket Australia turned to the one team member it knew it could trust: Paine, the polite young man who grew up in Lauderdale.

From suburban cricket to the top job in Australian sport in less than two years? You could hardly dream that up. But as the Mercury said on our front page on March 29 when Paine’s permanent appointment as captain was announced, “dreams do come true”.

PAINE’S RESTRAINT NOT IN VAIN

Everybody who has known Paine since he was youngster is always keen to point out how he hasn’t changed; how the fame and success has never gone to his head. He’s still Tim. A nice guy. A great bloke.

But as Australia’s favourite cricket writer Robert Craddock writes in today’s Mercury: “Good manners were never going to be enough to win back the public. They want grit and fight. They crave to be surprised by new heroes. And in Dubai on Thursday, to their great delight, they were.”

Thursday was the day Paine had the task of batting out almost two full sessions of play on a deteriorating wicket baking under the Middle Eastern sun against an attack featuring the man Shane Warne rates as one of the best spinners of the modern game, Yasir Shah.

He did so, staring down 194 balls, and shepherding the tail-enders through a perilous final hour which began with Yasir snaring the wicket of Usman Khawaja (whose eight hour-44 minute 141 off 302 balls was the second-longest knock in the fourth innings of a Test). With one over to be played, and Australia eight wickets down, Paine calmly kept the strike as Yasir spun his magic as seven close-in Pakistani fielders crowded Paine. The Tasmanian survived. And at the end, when he looked up to the dressing room to see not sighs of relief but an explosion of joy, the Australian captain gently motioned his right hand up and down in a gesture of restraint. “Calm down boys,” he was saying, “we haven’t won anything yet.”

And in that moment, perhaps more than any in this story so far, Paine proved to the nation — and the cricketing world — that he has what it takes to be Australian captain. Long may he remain there.