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Tim Paine has claimed he was effectively sacked from the Test captaincy by a PR consultant, slamming Cricket Australia chief executive Nick Hockley for not having the “courage” to do it himself.
Paine ultimately chose to step down as Australian skipper in the face of a sexting scandal last November, but only because he felt CA’s bosses had “held a gun to my head.”
In a revealing new book, The Price Paid, Paine opens up on his deep personal shame for his actions, but admits he felt hung out to dry by a CA board that years earlier had cleared his exchange with a female Tasmanian cricket employee as “consensual”, only to backflip on their support for him once the story was set to go public.
Paine is scathing on Hockley and CA executives for abandoning him and particularly for leaving it to a consultant outside the organisation to tell him he should walk the plank.
“We did a phone link which included this person they’d hired from a public relations firm who’d apparently given advice to the board in the past,” writes Paine.
“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 was if I stood down as captain.
“I was stunned by that, so was James (Paine’s manager, James Henderson).
“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. 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 have the courage to say it themselves, they were letting their hired consultant run the show.”
However, Paine feels he was betrayed by Cricket Australia and claims they contributed to an insinuation he had sexually harassed the woman, despite CA’s own integrity unit investigation in 2017 ruling it was a consensual text exchange.
“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,” Paine writes.
“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.
