Tim Paine: How English club cricket set Australia's captain on the path to the Ashes

Back in 2010 Australia's skipper had four Test caps to his name before a spell with Banbury in the Home Counties Premier League changed everything

Tim Paine will achieve what most Aussies cricketers can only dream of doing when he leads his side out at Edgbaston for the first Test of the Ashes on Thursday.

When he arrived here to play club cricket in 2015, though, the odds of him achieving that feat would have been as lengthy as those of a tie in World Cup final.

Payne was 30 at the time and having played his most recent Test against India in Bengaluru in October 2010, the chances of him adding to his then tally of four Test caps appeared a distant ambition.

Which is where Banbury of the Home Counties Premier League come in.

The club were initially on the lookout for an opening bowler to play for them and had been told that Paine was outside of their modest budget.

Without a recognised keeper, though, the club were in need of a safe pair of hands. And in Paine, they got the complete package.

Combining his time playing cricket for Banbury with coaching at Magdalen College School in Oxford - who made up the short fall in funding - Paine didn’t just contribute behind the stumps and at the crease – he rediscovered a zest for the game that ultimately won him an Australia recall and sent him flying to the top of the queue as his country desperately sought stability following the ball-tampering scandal.

Jimmy Phillips was his captain during his season with the club and saw at first hand just why Paine is possibly the most popular Australian captain to land on these shores in a generation or more.

“I remember it quite clearly," he says. "I took him round the club before we had even had our first training session that season and being surprised that he still had Australia on his radar. That was in 2015 – now four years later he’s captaining in an Ashes series.

“You can see why they turned to him after all the troubles they had. You would know he would be a man who would be a million miles away from anything like that.

“He is a really, really nice guy and everywhere he went that season, the opposition got on really well with him. I particularly recall one game we played away at Slough. He scored 120 or something like that, and at the end of the game all the opposition players came and stood round and chatted to him in the bar.

“He had ground their noses into the dirt on the field but he did it in a nice way. There was nothing showy about him at all. He’s the sort of person that people naturally gravitate towards.”

Paine will lead Australia into the Ashes on Thursday (Getty Images)

Phillips’ father, Martin, the Banbury Chairman, has since travelled to Australia and stayed with Paine and his wife Bonnie, who accompanied him on his trip to this quiet corner of Oxfordshire four summers' ago.

The couple now have two children, who will doubtless be hoping that daddy can help end an Australian Ashes series losing streak on English soil that now dates back to 2001, when Paine was a 16-year-old making his way in the game in Tasmania.

Much of the focus will be on the way he manages the trio of David Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft, who could all feature when the two sides clash in the Midlands later this week.

What will probably go un-noticed, on the other hand, is a wicketkeeping technique that would earn the approval of glovemen from any era.

“It's silky smooth,” says Phillips. “It wasn’t so much his ability as his technique which really caught the eye when he was with us. It was out of this world. Anyone who had ever kept wicket in their life would seem to turn up and head towards Tim at the club on a Wednesday night. He would be stood there with seven or eight keepers around him. And he was brilliant with all of them.”

Paine has experience on these shores (Getty Images)

Banbury could have even achieved the unlikely boast of having two former players in an Australian Ashes squad had Kurtis Patterson not been cut from the squad following last week’s Australia v Australia warm-up match in Southampton. He could consider himself unlikely having scored a century against Sri Lanka on debut at Canberra back in February.

Patterson spent a season at the club the year after Paine, with the initial plan being that the latter would return to play for them again in 2017 or 2018. As it is, fate intervened.

“He said he would be back to play for Banbury but the rules of the league mean that anyone who has played international cricket in the past 18 months can’t play,” says Phillips. “We were all hoping when he was recalled that it wasn’t a one-off appearance for Australia. We all wanted him to get a good run in the team. Now look what has happened.

“Me and a few of the guys will be at the first couple of days of the Headingley Test and also a day at Lords. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to catch up with him.”

Paine has said that his time in English club cricket helped to reignite his passion for the game. On the eve of the Ashes, England will hope they don’t have cause to regret Banbury’s unwitting intervention.