This is not how Pat Cummins would want to take the captaincy – during the trials of a friend who created his own misery and now has to accept responsibility
Honesty is a difficult business. There are people with an innate inability to lie, left with their own reality shaken if they try to misinform someone else’s. Safe to say they’re a minority. The impulse comes early, the way kids lie extravagantly, faces smeared in chocolate while denying any knowledge of a stolen block. Some of us never consistently grow out of that – this writer included. We feel trouble coming and our impulse is to hide. As adults, we’re not scared of being punished, we’re scared of being unloved. We’re scared of others seeing the things that we feel ashamed of and casting us out.
His dishonesty may have been by omission rather than commission, but you can understand why Tim Paine, by this point the Australian men’s cricket captain, never wanted to put the story of his dodgy text messages in the open. As well as the personal humiliation in front of a potential audience of millions, it would involve visiting that humiliation on his wife and kids, and the fear of being diminished for both reasons in the eyes of everyone he cares about. The anticipated shame of all of those things would be intense, as is the shame we have all internalised about our sexual wants and actions.
