The consultant then said that the best way to get ahead of the story as though I stood down as captain – Tim Paine

Boosting the top on his resignation as Australia’s Test skipper, Tim Paine has said that he felt ‘Abandoned’ by Cricket Australia following the sexting scandal last November, Tim Pane made the comments in his autobiography, the Price Paid which was released on Tuesday.

Boosting the top on his resignation as Australia’s Test skipper, Tim Paine has said that he felt ‘Abandoned’ by Cricket Australia following the sexting scandal last November.

Tim Paine made the comments in his autobiography, The Price Paid, he addressed the events that led to him standing down after CA and his manager, James Henderson failed to stop the publication of the story around his express instant message exchange with a female employee of Cricket Tasmania, dating back to 2017. 

At the time, the board’s integrity unit had cleared Paine of any breach of the code of conduct, concluding the exchange to be consensual.

“We did a phone link which included this person they’d hired from a public relations firm who’d advised the board in the past,”

Paine wrote in his book. 

“He said that he’d been in the newspaper game for many years and this was going to be huge and would not go away. I found it very strange that this person, someone I’d never met and someone who did not work at Cricket Australia, took the lead in the call while Nick, the chief executive, took a back seat.

“The consultant then said that the best way to get ahead of the story as if I stood down as captain. I was stunned by that, and so was James. Who was this guy? What did he know about the circumstances? That was the first time anyone had mentioned me resigning as captain. There was no way I was doing that,”

he added.

Slamming CA’s unfortunate treatment of the entire adventure, Paine said he felt as if there was a ‘gun to his head’ and that he would have been removed had he not taken the choice to leave himself.

“I knew what had happened. Cricket Australia knew what had happened and in my mind, this guy didn’t know, or worse than that, it was like he believed that I had sexually harassed her.

“Then Nick chimed in, saying how experienced this guy was and how he thought I should listen to his advice. I said, ‘Do you want me to resign as Test captain, Nick? He couldn’t give me a straight answer, or wouldn’t. He kept talking around in circles.

“And this guy said, ‘If you resign as Test captain it will take the air out of it but if you stay on they are going to keep coming at you.’ I think he said I wouldn’t last until Monday and I replied that I would if they backed me in.

“I said to Nick, ‘You and the board know what’s happened, you have an integrity report that clears me of any wrongdoing to anybody and that it was a personal matter. It was becoming obvious what Cricket Australia wanted me to do but they didn’t dare to say it themselves, they were letting their hired consultant run the show. They’d held a gun to my head. I couldn’t go on without their support.”

“I felt they were driven by the need to protect their image, they’d got in someone to look after them and he’d decided that I had to be sacrificed to save them, they were hanging me out to dry. The board had met that night and it was clear to me that they wanted to cut and run. I think that’s why they got Nick and the consultant to call me.

“I was disappointed and I was tired of this. I was prepared to cop the flak for what I did, but in my mind, Cricket Australia had abandoned me and made it look like they thought I’d sexually harassed someone so everyone else would think that too. I felt like their flipping almost vindicated the story.

“The thing that got me later was when Cricket Australia said they would have handled it differently to the way it was done back in 2017, but for that seven days or whatever it was, they were doing their level best to stop the story coming out. When it got out, they seemed to change their tune about it.”