Tim Paine

Tim Paine was ready to turn his back on professional cricket in 2017 and take a job with Kookaburra as a sponsorship representative. By March 2018, he became Australia's 46th Test captain and spent the next 12 months guiding the Test team through one of the most tumultuous periods in Australian cricket history following the ball tampering scandal in South Africa.

A wicketkeeper-batsman who was next in line behind Brad Haddin as far back as 2009, his career was almost ended by a finger injury that required multiple operations. Paine originally broke his right index finger in November 2010, when he was struck on the hand by a Dirk Nannes delivery while batting in an Australian Cricketers' Association All-Stars T20 match, and it caused him considerable problems over the next few years. It was extremely unfortunate timing for Paine. He was the ODI wicketkeeper and opening batsman in Australia's Champions Trophy triumph in 2009 and played four Tests in 2010 against Pakistan and India. Although Paine subsequently appeared in a few ODIs and T20s, he spent nearly six years out of the national set-up before being recalled in February 2017 for a T20 series against Sri Lanka.

It had looked as though Paine would perhaps never play for Australia again, for at times, as his career progressed, he was not even the first-choice gloveman for Tasmania. In first-class cricket he suffered from a lack of hundreds -the 215 that he scored while playing as a specialist batsman in his fifth Sheffield Shield game, back in October 2006, was his only first-class century until late 2019. A respected leader who often captained Tasmania, Paine also led Hobart Hurricanes, and it was ultimately through T20 that his return to international cricket finally arrived.

The composure Paine showed in the shortest form, combined with the underwhelming contributions of Peter Nevill and Matthew Wade, led selectors to think laterally ahead of the 2017-18 Ashes, in which his selection was the most surprising and indeed contentious. But he performed admirably as part of a winning team, and then found himself thrust into the centre of things on the subsequent South Africa tour. He was initially the man who separated David Warner from Quinton de Kock in the Durban stairwell, then the man who replaced Steven Smith as captain the morning after the Newlands ball-tampering fiasco. His poise with the bat, behind the stumps and in front of the cameras had always marked Paine as a leader, now bolstered by the life experience of those years lost to finger surgeries.
ESPNcricinfo staff