PAINE AND GAIN
WHEN I CATCH UP with Tim Paine, he’s driving through heavy rain on a dreary Hobart day. It’s the middle of winter and Paine is on his way home after finishing his morning training session at Bellerive Oval. On the way he’ll stop off at his favourite spot, the Sandy Bay Bakery, where he goes most days to get a salad roll. Because it’s winter and the gauge on Paine’s dash says it’s 10 degrees outside, he’ll have a vegetable soup with his roll. If it were summer, he’d have a coffee. Simple pleasures for a man who likes to keep things straight forward.
If it all sounds a little humdrum for an Australian cricket captain that’s fine by Paine. With its familiar faces and simple daily rituals, Hobart in July is about as far away as you can get from the MCG on Boxing Day.
There is a parallel universe in which Paine isn’t here in Hobart at all but living an anonymous, possibly even more ho-hum life on the ‘big island’. In that universe he quit cricket four years ago, took up a job as a sponsorship rep with Kookaburra and is now living comfortably enough with wife Bonnie and their two children, Milla, four, and Charlie, two, in Melbourne. Paine is the rare sportsman who’s relaxed about the prospect of retirement because he was never really supposed to be in this position to begin with. “I’ve played a lot more cricket for Australia than I thought I was going to,” he says. “It’s all come as a bit of
