Players have done a great job of improving behaviour, feels Tim Paine
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Tim Paine believes that following the 2018 ball-tampering scandal, Australian players have done a great job in improving their behaviour on and off the field while keeping the competitive environment alive. Paine further added that the documentary was Justin Langer's idea to show the team culture.
While the line "hard but fair" had been blurred to a bigger margin, leading to bans, sanctions, culture reviews and new appointments, it invariably created a more likeable Aussie side that was so different from their past teams. Ably led by Tim Paine, who was so confident on his own skin, and marshalled by a legend of the game - Justin Langer, who till date remains the most intense cricketer you'll ever meet - Australia revived themselves to retain the urn in England and qualified for the World Cup semi-finals. Paine believes that it is the byproduct of understanding the own mistakes and then acting on it.
"So I think in general the behaviour throughout cricket in Australia has improved. I think the players have done a great job of that. It's still a really competitive environment where you're going at each other... but I think certainly in the time I've been in cricket, the banter or abuse level has certainly changed," Paine was quoted as saying by ESPN Cricinfo.
"I think that's a good thing, I think that's what we want, I think it then allows us to have things like the stump mics turned up and we're able to take fans and spectators even closer to the game. Hopefully, that behavioural trend can continue. I think it's just been a change in mindset. I think those combative players still play the way they play, they've had to think a little bit more about how they go about it or what they actually say.
"I think there's still plenty of chat on cricket fields that I've been on, there's certainly still ways of getting in the contest and trying to get into players' heads without flat-out abusing them, and I think that's been shown by the Australian men's team in particular."
The documentary showed that during the Christmas and New Year period during the India Test series in 2018-19, players and the coach unhappy with how their relationship was progressing thanks to Langer's harsh words after failures. But with each success, that changed - the result of which can be seen in the way the team moved on from the Headingley loss to put in an Ashes-clinching performance at Old Trafford. Paine revealed that it was not a conscious effort by the documentary makers.
"I think having him there, as we've said a few times, once you sort of got used to it, the first week or so, we literally went ahead as we normally would. We didn't change any meeting set-ups or any discussions that we would normally have because the documentary was being made. It was business as usual. That's what we wanted it to be, with probably the one exception being the one after Headingley, which was something we hadn't done. And again, it wasn't done for the documentary.
"That was done because JL thought it was something we needed to do, which was to address the mistakes, speak about it in front of each other and come up with ways with which we could move forward and win that next Test in Manchester. So that was slightly different to the norm, I suppose. Because normally you do look at a lot of footage by yourselves as cricketers, not so much in front of the team and going forward as much as we did.
"So that was different but certainly now it's opened our eyes to different ways of going about it. We are certainly a lot more open and honest and we can do it a lot quicker as well. That's one of the great things to come out of that Headingley Test match and the way we addressed it afterwards," Paine concluded.
