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Tim Paine – oh captain, my captain!

Roar Guru
28th December, 2018
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Roar Guru
28th December, 2018
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It’s November 1984 and I’m 16 years old. I’m at school with a small yellow transistor radio close to my ear, listening to the last day of the second Test between the Aussies and the Windies.

My heroes are being pummelled, and before the end of the day Clive Lloyd’s men will enjoy a 2-0 lead in the five-Test series. But I am savouring every last forlorn moment because I know this is the last Test match I will enjoy firsthand for several years.

I am about to embark upon both the most challenging calamity in my early life and the greatest adventure – in a week’s time my father’s job will see us yanked from our comfortable life in Sydney and parachuted into a new life in Tokyo for several years.

The Japanese are yet to embrace the timeless art of Test cricket, so I won’t be turning on my TV in Komazawa at 10:50am to hear Richie Benaud intone, “Good morning and welcome to the Adelaide Oval for the third Test in this intriguing series”.

My father, keenly aware of the horrible sacrifice I am making, has purchased me a short-wave radio. In the years to come I will sit alone and watch its light, my only friend through teenage nights. I will spend hours searching aimlessly for the Radio Australia signal, because everything I need to know, I hear it on my radio. Too often my search will be in vain and I will have to rely upon the BBC World News to hear the score or, worse still, wait until the English-language papers are published in the morning.

If only the internet had been invented 20 years earlier.

But on that epochal day in 1984 – for me, the last of its kind ever – I am walking to Hornsby train station with my transistor to my ear. The West Indians need only 23 to win in their second innings, but they’re stumbling at 2-18. I’ve mentioned my clinically insane optimism in previous Roar articles. Well, on this day my condition is at the florid end of the spectrum. I am actually contemplating, with rising excitement, whether two more wickets might just provoke a Calypso panic and an unlikely Australian victory!

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The Windies, however, somehow manage to maintain their collective composure and secure an eight-wicket victory.

So, that was that. My last Test match for three Australian summers, done and dusted.

I will admit to feeling a tremendous cloud gather over my head and descend over my soul. I don’t think I ever felt so sad. But more sadness was about to hit my young cricketing heart for six.

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As I trudge home from the bus stop I turn on my transistor radio again and am alarmed to hear that my boyhood hero, Kim Hughes, had chucked it in as Australia’s captain! What?

I had been Kim’s strongest advocate in the quadrangle of my private school. I always took his side against those arguing the case for the Chappell brothers and their henchmen, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh. I had defended him at every opportunity with gravity due the moment. I was infamous for it.

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And now Kim had surrendered to forces both within and without the team. Could a greater tragedy befall my young life? Not only was I facing a future without ready access to the sport I loved, but I would embark into the unknown without my hero at the helm.

Later, when I saw the embodiment of the cricketer I wanted to be blubbering on the TV news, my soul was crushed.

History demonstrates, however, that good emerged from the Ashes of that tragic distant day. On a personal level, those years in Japan helped sculpt the man I am today. And Kim’s teary resignation ushered in the Allan Border years, which provided the foundation for Australia’s dominance in the 1990s and 2000s.

Border was the right man at the right time.

A reluctant captain at first, Border’s staccato triumphs were slow to gather momentum. But with the World Cup win in 1987 and the Ashes glory in 1989, Captain Grumpy slowly cultivated a formidable team built on an ethos of uncompromising, hard-fought cricket.

By the time Border retired in 1994 we had a team of which we were proud and the final triumph – a series win against the Windies in the Carribean – awaited us just over the sunlit horizon.

Nothing on a cricket field has provoked the same level of gloomy depression until the grating sandpaper scandal earlier this year. Everything I cherished about Australian cricket was cast asunder. For weeks, perhaps months, I walked around in a daze trying to make sense of it.

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I have written before on the Roar about the cost not counted. Yet, I can now see the good which is emerging from the bleak cesspool of the ball-tampering abomination.

In Tim Paine’s men I see an Australian team I am proud of. They are playing with a spirit and a determination which I admire. They have heart.

Tim Paine

(Ashley Vlotman/Gallo Images/Gallo Images)

I concede that one Test victory does not a summer make. But when you add the tenacious draw in Dubai and the stirring last-day fight in Adelaide, there is a trend line which illustrates the character of the team. These guys have the heart to achieve results many commentators have declared are beyond them.

In the meantime Paine’s predecessor has demonstrated his disturbing lack of good judgment. First is the admission that he turned a blind eye to Dave Warner’s plan to cheat in Cape Town. That confirmation alone is condemning.

Then there is his ill-advised Vodafone advertisement. Did it really never occur to him that it was a horrible idea to use his community service – a service he was obligated to provide, by the way – to help a corporation sell its product? Whether he donated some or all of his fee to charity is irrelevant. The advertisement twists a reprehensible failure of leadership into some kind of heroic comeback for the purpose of boosting a corporation’s profits.

When I compare Smith’s actions to Tim Paine’s quiet determination to represent his country with honour I actually feel visceral anger.

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Which leads me to this point: like Border in the mid-1980s, Tim Paine is the right man at the right time. As far as I am concerned, he is my cricket team’s captain. He’s no ‘stand-in’. If Smith thinks he can walk back into the captaincy once his exclusion period ends, he can forget it.

It’s Tim’s job for as long as his form merits selection in the team.

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