Ex-Test captain Tim Paine slams Cricket Australia in autobiography

Tasmania's former national captain has largely stayed quiet over the sexting and sandpaper controversies which dominated his second incarnation as a Test player.

But he doesn't hold back in an autobiography which accuses Cricket Australia of being "driven by the need to protect their image".

"I'm upset and I'm angry ... I feel I've been let down by Cricket Australia," Paine writes.

"I believed I had the support of my employer ... [but] I had to say the words they wouldn't say. I couldn't go on without their support."

He also describes Cricket Australia's treatment of coach Justin Langer as "embarrassing", "unprofessional", "a disgrace" and "an insult" and accuses South Africa of ball-tampering hypocrisy, saying: "Everybody moans about the other side doing it, but there are no cleanskins in cricket and there weren't in that game."

Paine's book The Price Paid says Cricket Australia had known about the 2017 sexting incident for four years, had cleared him of any wrongdoing and were "doing their level best to stop the story coming out", but only chose to act when it was exposed by the media.

Describing the original incident as "unspeakably, unforgivably stupid", he recalls a phone link-up in November 2021 with Cricket Australia chief executive Nick Hockley and an unnamed public relations consultant.

"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."

When the consultant suggested the best way to get ahead of the story was for Paine to resign as Test captain, he asked Hockley if he agreed. "He couldn't give me a straight answer, or wouldn't," Paine writes.

"This guy said ... if you stay on they are going to keep coming at you. I think he said that 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."

"When Nick asked me what I wanted to do, I said, 'Stick with the plans which we agreed to in the first place, nothing has changed, nothing has changed except it is going public and that is what we had the plans for'."

Paine adds: "I was so disappointed ... It was obvious the board wanted me to resign and I had no option if they weren't going to back me. I felt they were driven by the need to protect their image.

"In my mind Cricket Australia had abandoned me and made it look like they thought I'd sexually harrassed someone and so everyone else would think that too. I felt like them flipping validated the story."

After Cricket Australia held a press conference saying they should have handled the initial incident differently, Paine writes: "Really? Nothing had changed. Not one thing. They'd investigated me and cleared me. The reality was they were happy to defend me and accept I hadn't breached their code of conduct as long as it was kept private. If the story hadn't run, I would still be captain and if Cricket Australia had handled it like they said they would I would still be playing for Australia."

Paine details the effect the saga had on his personal life, saying he lost 10 kilograms in weight, faced the end of his marriage and adding: "The bottom had fallen out of my world and I was in freefall."

The 37-year-old Hobart-born father-of-two also gives a detailed account of the 2018 Sandpapergate incident in Cape Town, saying ball-tampering is "commonplace" and "everyone has done it over the years".

"Nobody, however, would admit it if asked. It is cricket's dirty secret. I think that is part of why the issue became so big. Everyone did it and everyone denied it."

Refuting any suggestion of a team plan to use sandpaper on the ball during the third Test, Paine says he was "shocked" when he saw footage of Cameron Bancroft hiding the evidence in his trousers.

"I was stunned. We all were," he says. "It was a Test match and it was on the big screen and it looked terrible. My heart sank. I was thinking 'What the f***?' A sense of dread came over us all."

However, Paine claims the South Africans were doing similar things in the same series but covering their tracks better.

"I was standing at the bowlers' end in the next Test when a shot came up on the screen of a South African player at mid-off having a huge crack at the ball. The television director, who had played an active role in catching our Cam, immediately pulled the shot off the screen. We went to the umpires about it, which might seem a bit poor, but we'd been slaughtered and were convinced they'd been up to it since the first Test. But the footage got lost. As it would."

The Price Paid ($49.99) is published by Pan Macmillan Australia.

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