Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison congratulated Tim Paine and his Australia team on retaining Ashes urn in England on Sunday (September 8) and he is now determined to finish off the ongoing five-match Test series on high against Joe Root and his team at The Oval.
Paine on Wednesday, 11th September, revealed that he received congratulatory note from Mr. Morrison after his team’s massive win of 185 runs over the hosts in the 4th Test at Old Trafford, where Australia retained the Urn in England for the first time since 2001.
The skipper was also delighted to get the PM's number and said he 'might ring him' if Australia manages to win the fifth and final Test starting from September 12 at The Oval to clinch the Ashes series.
Noteworthy, former Australian PM John Howard had ranked his job as the 2nd most important job in the country, ranking himself below to the Test skipper, and it seems that current PM was moved with his comment to contact with his ‘superior’ after Paine retained the Ashes for Australia after a long gap of 18 years in England.
Paine told reporters in London, “My phone's gone berserk. I haven't got through them all yet. I got a text from the Prime Minister, which was very exciting.”
The skipper continued, “A first for me. I've got his number now... I'm going to save it and I might ring him if we win this one. He was pretty pumped. Along the same lines of messages, we got from a lot of people back home in Australia - congratulations, everyone's proud of us, Steve Smith's a freak and make sure you finish it off this week.”
Since the Cape Town cheating scandal, Paine has done a lot of hard work to bring in positive changes in the side and also created a legacy for himself by pulling his team out of the crisis and now Ashes success.
However, there are talks that the 34-year-old could leave captaincy after this Ashes 2019, but Paine dismissed that by saying he is loving his job and would like to continue doing it as long as he can.
Paine signed off by saying, “Not for me, not at the moment. I'm loving doing what I'm doing, and I think while you've got a job that you love, you try and do it for as long as you can. I did miss a lot, I suppose, in the prime years of my cricket career. The positive of that now is that physically I'm in really good condition for my age, and feel really good after Test matches physically. Mentally, it's a different story but it only takes a day to recover from that. While I keep enjoying it, I'll keep doing it.”
(With India Today Inputs)
