Tim Paine, who called time on his first-class career on Friday, experienced a steep rise and fast fall like few others, writes DANIEL CHERNY.
Elevated on the back of one scandal involving someone sticking something down their pants, and displaced after taking something out of his own, it is hard to think of a modern Australian sportsperson who leaves as complicated a legacy as Tim Paine.
Paine’s career is ultimately one of “what ifs?” What if he hadn’t been felled by Dirk Nannes? What if he had taken the Kookaburra gig? What if Cameron Bancroft hadn’t been caught? What if Australia had kept its over rate in check during the Boxing Day Test of 2020? And most of all, what if he hadn’t sent that photo?
For a very long time, the gloveman, who retired from first-class cricket on Friday afternoon at the conclusion of Tasmania’s Sheffield Shield draw against Queensland, was destined to be an unfulfilled talent, a handful of Tests deputising for Brad Haddin in 2010 appearing to be the extent of his time in the baggy green; the broken finger sustained in an exhibition match shortly before the 2010-11 Ashes series derailing a career trajectory which to that point had him on track to be Haddin’s long-term successor.
So marginalised did Paine become within the Tasmanian set up by the mid-part of the decade that he almost walked away from playing entirely to take up a job at Kookaburra. That he opted to persist changed the course of Australian cricket history.
A sequence of events across the 2017-18 season would ultimately define an era of Australian cricket. From being on the outer of Tassie’s Shield line-up, Paine leapfrogged back into the Test team for the Ashes series, performing tidily with the gloves and solidly with the bat. As the cultural rot within the national team took hold, Paine became more deeply enmeshed in the side. When a leader was needed in Australia’s most desperate hour following the Cape Town ball tampering plot, it was the charming, polished and hardened Paine who became a convenient figurehead to lead Australia into a period of regeneration and reputation restoration.
On this front, Paine was for a time close to flawless. His gentle bantering nature made him a strong foil for Justin Langer’s patriotic intensity, and while tactical blunders at Manchester and The Oval denied the Aussies a series victory, Paine was good enough to lead his side to a 2-2 draw in England in 2019, making him the only Australian men’s captain to hold the Ashes trophy aloft abroad for more than two decades. That will serve as his crowning glory, but nor should it be forgotten that under Paine and Langer Australia also rose to the No. 1 Test ranking after a dominant home summer in 2019-20.
As Australia prepares for its first World Test Championship final in June, it is the failure to qualify for the corresponding fixture two summers ago that serves as the blackest on-field mark for the Paine the captain, who led his country in 23 of the 35 Tests he played.
Having thrashed India in Adelaide, Paine’s side squandered a golden opportunity, falling in Melbourne – a match in which an ultimately telling over rate penalty was incurred – before losing its collective nerve on final days in Sydney and Brisbane. It was in the former that Paine’s composure was most undermined, his exchange with Ravichandran Ashwin not a moment that reflected well on him.
Calling Ashwin a “dickhead” was nothing, though, compared to the similarly-themed skeleton lying in a shallow grave. It had been around Paine’s return to the Test side that he had sent an R-rated photo to a Cricket Tasmania employee. Consent was contested, but in any case Paine had made a grievous error, one that would cost him his job and a fairytale exit four summers later.
Paine resigned, and would later take a swipe at Cricket Australia’s handling of the issue, particularly the alleged outsourcing of the matter by CA chief executive Nick Hockley.
In any event, it was a chapter to taint perceptions of Paine, and one which sent him into a downward spiral.
That could easily have been that, but Paine did not want to finish on such a note. Without a state contract, he swallowed his pride and played out a final season with the Tigers.
His returns were modest, and he had to contend with a stint running the drinks, but at least he could go out on his terms. While he is not a great of Australian cricket on any metric, he is clearly a great of the Apple Isle, with his 297 first-class dismissals the most of any Tassie gloveman.
More pertinently, Paine won two Shield titles with Tassie, including being a member of the drought breakers of 2006-07.
In terms of pure wicketkeeping he was lithe and skilful, close to if not the best of his contemporaries. His batting, once punchy, was always technically sound and further refined. The longtime millstone and mystery of his dearth of first-class centuries lingered as a talking point, and a Test ton ultimately eluded him (he did score a sole one-day international hundred), but an average of 32.63 spoke to a useful contributor, no Adam Gilchrist or even Haddin but an upgrade with the willow on Peter Nevill and on par with his long-time Tasmanian frenemy Matthew Wade.
But to compare Paine only to the Test ‘keepers who predated him would be to miss the point.
His career was one of a kind: good, bad and ugly.