Ordinarily, a grubby sports sex scandal unfolding many thousands of kilometres away from SA and with little, direct relevance to this country should be fulsomely ignored. But there is just too much about Tim Paine’s resignation as Australia’s Test captain that screams out for closer inspection.
Not as close as the attention paid by the recipient of a photograph of Paine’s genitals three years ago, but a good look, nonetheless. There has always been a “larrikin” side to Paine, enhanced by a second sporting life in which he rose from a near career-ending finger injury to the job many Australians call the second-most important in the country behind the prime minister.
He would never have completed the journey without the cynical decision of his predecessor, Steve Smith, to condone the Sandpapergate episode at Newlands in early 2018. But he would never even have started the journey had those running the game in Australia in the months after the scandal been anywhere near a moral compass.
Many sportsmen (and sportswomen) can be late emotional developers. They can be vain and egotistical — many of them need those “qualities” to survive in the brutally unforgiving world in which they exist and compete.
“Dick-pics” have been a thing in professional sport even before cellphones. If you’re old enough to remember Polaroids, you’ll get the picture — so to speak. They could be delivered within minutes with a snarly message scrawled on the back. So Tim Paine, notwithstanding his marital and family status, is just a standard sporting dickhead who chose to send a copy of his to a female colleague at Cricket Tasmania.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Cricket Australia and Cricket Tasmania both investigated the situation and exonerated Paine on allegations that he had breached either of their codes of conduct. Sending unsolicited snaps of your knackers to a colleague was deemed not to be harassment.
In fact, it was deemed to be such a minor misdemeanour as to be inconsequential in his appointment as the “cleanest” man to lead Australian cricket out of the deepest of several deep moral and ethical quagmires in the past 30 years: “Yep, Tim’s basically squeaky clean, apart from that ‘thing’ last month. But nobody’s going to know about that ...”
Cricket Australia chair Richard Freudenstein and CEO Nick Hockley finally held a media conference to answer questions on the matter last week. Both reminded the media that neither of them was in place when the decision to clear Paine was taken by the previous board. Then Freudenstein said that, given the same circumstances today, the current board of directors would have come to a different conclusion and not endorsed Paine’s captaincy.
“I wasn’t there in 2018. I’m not sure of all the circumstances that took place. What I am saying is that, faced with the facts as they are today, the board of Cricket Australia today would not have made that decision,” Freudenstein said.
Hockley claimed he became aware of the Paine situation a couple of days before Paine’s tearful farewell while Freudenstein said he was “briefed” in 2019 but not made “fully aware of the details”.
So. Three years ago Tim Paine was cleared of misconduct but the chair of the board says a different decision would have been reached today — based on the same code of conduct. He also insisted the code was “fit for purpose”. The difference between the first verdict and the one the board might have reached today is — the publicity. Misbehaviour isn’t the crime — getting caught is.
When Freudenstein talks of the continuing “player education programme” which addresses “a whole range of things including texting” and says the board is undertaking a “full review of our entire harassment and discrimination policy” it is hard not to raise an eyebrow. Cricket Australia has been saying such things on a regular basis since Sandpapergate when Paine was appointed to head up a new era of honesty. Elite honesty, no less.
Tim Paine’s off-field behaviour and the details of Cricket Australia’s “integrity investigation” really are none of Cricket SA’s business. What is a legitimate concern, and not just for Cricket SA but the rest of the Test nations, is that an attitude of disingenuous selfishness prevails at Cricket Australia. Members will do what they want, when they want and how they want it. And they will explain it how they want, too.
Cricket SA had a bellyful of this attitude last year when Cricket Australia cancelled the Test tour to SA citing spurious health and logistical “concerns” shortly before giving 15 players permission to travel to India for the Indian Premier League where the Covid-19 infection rate was 20 times higher than SA’s.
Australia’s opponents on the field for much of the past three years say nothing has changed — except the players take more precautions not to be “caught” by stump microphones and cameras. It really would be a shame if the game’s administrators are also paying mere lip-service to a new era and a better way.
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