Former Cricket Australia chairman David Peever has blasted the current CA board, accusing it of abandoning Tim Paine after he stepped down from the Test captaincy.
Speaking publicly for the first time since stepping down as chairman in late 2018, Peever took issue with current chair Richard Freudenstein’s claim that the new administration would have acted differently and sacked Paine in 2018.
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“Cricket Australia’s decision seems knee jerk and unfortunately shows double standards. The issue has been doing the rounds in cricket circles for some years now,” Peever told the Daily Telegraph.
“The current chairman has been on the board for two years and it is implausible he didn’t know about it.
“If he and his board felt so strongly about it, why wait until now to act?”
Peever added that Paine deserved some loyalty from Cricket Australia and to “not be abandoned at this time”, accusing the current board of “making up rules as you go”.
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The ex-chairman’s views were echoed by former Cricket Australia board member Mark Taylor.
“Three-and-a-half or four years of hindsight is a wonderful thing isn’t it?” Taylor told Nine’s Sports Sunday in response to Freudenstein’s comments.
“I don’t know if he has any more information than the integrity unit of Cricket Australia had in 2018.
“I think it’s interesting to note that even now, having said that as the Cricket Australia chair they didn’t stand Tim down, he stood down, he resigned himself.”
Taylor explained why the previous board under Peever’s leadership opted not to make the investigation into Paine’s conduct a public matter.
“What was done as an internal investigation in the middle of 2018, a decision was taken by the integrity unit and supported by the board to keep this in-house,” he said.
“There’s obviously been a lot of conjecture of the rights and the wrongs of that, but that decision was made not just on what’s best for cricket but what was best for Tim Paine, Bonnie Paine and also the woman involved.
“This was handled in-house for the good of all parties involved at the time.”