Cricket Tasmania has come out in support of Tim Paine, accusing Cricket Australia of treating the former Australia captain “appallingly” over the text-message scandal that led to his resignation.
Paine stepped down from his role just weeks out from the start of the Ashes after becoming aware that details of sexually explicit messages he sent to a Cricket Tasmania colleague in 2017 were to go public.
The wicketkeeper was cleared of breaching CA’s code of conduct in 2018 after an integrity unit investigation. In a press conference on Saturday, current CA chairman Richard Freudenstein said the current hierarchy national body would not have appointed Paine captain in 2018 had they “been faced with the same circumstances and with the benefit of all the relevant information about this matter”. Neither Freudenstein or current chief executive Nick Hockley were in place at CA in 2018.
On Tuesday Cricket Tasmania released a statement from their chair Andrew Gaggin in which he condemned the national governing body’s handling of the incident and that it had been received poorly in Paine’s home state.
“In conversations I have had in recent days it is clear that the anger amongst the Tasmanian cricket community and general public is palpable,” Gaggin said. “Tim Paine has been a beacon for Australian cricket over the past four years and instrumental in salvaging the reputation of the national team after the calamity of Cape Town.
“Yet, at a time when CA should have supported Tim, he was evidently regarded as dispensable. The treatment afforded to the Australian Test captain by Cricket Australia has been appalling, and the worst since Bill Lawry over 50 years ago.
“The Cricket Tasmania Board reaffirmed its view that Paine should not have been put in a position where he felt the need to resign over an incident that was determined by an independent inquiry at the time to not be a breach of the Code of Conduct and was a consensual and private exchange that occurred between two mature adults and was not repeated.”
