Poisoned chalice no more
Calling out England’s thin-skinned cricketers shows Australian captain Tim Paine is finally comfortable at the reins.
Aless turbulent sporting journey, but a compelling one nonetheless, is that of Australian cricket captain Tim Paine, who has gone from prodigy to forgotten man to sacrificial lamb to saviour.
A wicketkeeper-batsman from Tasmania, Paine was the youngest Australian player to be awarded a contract (he was 16 at the time; he’s now 35). After captaining the Australian under-19 side, he made an instant impact on the first-class scene and duly progressed to the national team. A glittering career seemed a matter of course.
But a complicated finger injury took him out of the game for two years, and sport, like nature, abhors a vacuum. By 2017, having been talked out of retiring, Paine was playing for the Tasmanian
2nd XI as a specialist batsman. Then, in a left-field call that, with the benefit of hindsight, warrants the description “inspired”, he was recalled to the Australian team after a seven-year absence, equalling the record for the most tests between appearances.
When the “Sandpapergate” scandal erupted in March 2018, Paine was handed the poisoned chalice of leading a demoralised team deprived of its two best players. In practice, that meant retaining his dignity while the rest of the cricket world revelled in Australia’s humiliation and waited for proof that, for all the talk of transforming the team culture, the leopard hadn’t changed its spots.
For a time, it seemed as if Paine was destined to be a Trivial Pursuit question: who was Australia’s stand-in captain while Steve Smith served his ban? Against the odds, however, he has presided over a culture change and got Australia back to winning ways.
Now, he obviously feels secure enough to call out English hypocrisy over fan abuse. Despite having served their bans and suffered severe public humiliation and loss of income, Smith and fellow miscreant David Warner had to grin and bear relentless abuse from English spectators during last year’s World Cup and Ashes series. The English team, though, got on their high horse recently when a South African spectator mockingly compared talismanic all-rounder Ben Stokes to pop star Ed Sheeran – a comparison some might think does Sheeran no favours.
Said Paine: “You cannot react to the crowd [like Stokes in South Africa] but then always encourage the Barmy Army to do exactly the same and worse – abuse players. They clap [the Army] at the end of the day’s play and make a point of thanking them.”
He could have added that, unlike India’s Virat Kohli and Pakistan’s Sarfaraz Ahmed, England captains Eoin Morgan (World Cup) and Joe Root (Ashes) studiously declined to call on their fans to give Smith and Warner a break.