"Everything I Did Was Centred Around Me And What I Needed To Do": Former Australian Skipper Tim Paine Discusses The Sexting Controversy

Tim Paine, a former Australian test captain, has been honest about his “selfish” preoccupation with cricket, his shortcomings as a husband and father, which nearly caused his marriage to wife Bonnie to end in divorce, and the professional guidance he sought to realign his life.

The Price Paid: A Story of Life, Cricket, and Lessons Learned, the Tasmanian’s candid autobiography, will be published next week. Paine told veteran News Corp cricket writer Peter Lalor, “That’s as hard as it gets.”

That Period Of My Life Still Upsets Me: Tim Paine

“I was broken at the time. One day I was in the garage and I saw the Cricket Australia bag on the shelf and the Tasmanian one next to it and became overcome by the urge to throw them out. Everything went – but fortunately my club kit was in another room and it survived.”

Tim Paine was Steve Smith’s young pupil who made his test debut with him in 2010, but his career was brutally cut short when he broke his finger in an exhibition game a few months later, necessitating many surgeries.

After being persuaded to postpone his retirement in favour of taking a sales position with cricket gear manufacturer Kookaburra in 2017, Paine unexpectedly earned a call-up to the test team. Paine set off a ticking time bomb that would destroy his career and threaten to do the same to his family nearly as soon as he recovered the dream.

Prior to the first test match against England in November, Tim Paine had a sexting interaction with Cricket Tasmania employee Renee Ferguson in his hotel room in Brisbane. This exchange would plague him during what should have been a fairytale comeback.

The following year, when skipper Steve Smith and his backup David Warner were suspended following the sandpaper gate controversy in South Africa, Paine’s remarkable ascension reached its pinnacle.

After leaving Cricket Tasmania, Ferguson did, however, file complaints regarding Paine and other staff members’ actions in 2018.

I Could Not See How Selfish I Was: Tim Paine

Ferguson was later charged with fraud against Cricket Australia in 2017, whereupon she entered a not-guilty plea. Numerous times the lawsuit has been postponed, most recently last month.

Ferguson is suing her former employer on the grounds that four former coworkers are accused of harassing her sexually. The accusations were refuted.

The inquiry by Cricket Tasmania and Cricket Australia cleared Paine, 37, who maintains that the exchange was consensual.

But when the controversy became out in November of last year, Cricket Australia ordered him to step down as captain. He then stopped playing for the Australian and Tasmanian sides.

“I never thought I wasn’t putting my wife and family first, but when I took a step back it is ridiculous that I couldn’t see how selfish I was, how much in my own bubble I was,” Paine told Lalor.

“I remember Bonnie saying something to me years ago and I was thinking, ‘What is she talking about? I’m a good husband, I do everything’, but I see now I was hopeless. I wasn’t a horrible person, but everything I did was centred around me and what I needed to do. And now I probably am – no, I am – completely the opposite.

“I don’t know if I could play international cricket the way I am now, maybe I would be better, but I have always been the sort of person who thought they needed to be fully immersed, that’s the way I’ve done it. I didn’t know any other way.”

“Initially, I was just concerned with losing cricket, but that soon became the least of my concerns. It was shocking. I’d be ­sitting at home thinking of the memories we’d had in it, about the kids and everything Bonnie and I had created, and to think I’d messed that up was horrible.

“It was sickening and then it got to the point where I thought why bother even trying.”

Professional counselling salvaged the couple’s marriage, and Tim Paine has just started playing again for Tasmania.

“I changed my thinking,” he says. “I shut up and just worked on becoming the person I wanted to be and should have been and slowly things turned around. Our relationship is much better now.”

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