Peter Roebuck - constant soul searcher and loner

I can't say that I was a particular fan of Peter Roebuck, although I do think that any professional cricket journalist who challenges the meandering "leadership" of the ICC consistently can only help improve cricket administration. No bad thing that he was happy to challenge the status quo and apparent norms.

Sadly I think there's more to come out about Roebuck's personal life but what we do know is that a 26 year-old Zimbabwean Itai Gondo has alleged a sexual assault and that, after questioning from South African police, he threw himself out of his 6th floor hotel room rather than face the allegation. Having been found guilty in 2001 of common assault after caning three 19 year-old South African's he was coaching in 1999, Roebuck received a suspended sentence, so this wasn't the first related allegation. Caning was one thing, but one of the men, Henk Lendique, has reported that Roebuck was keen to see his bare buttocks after the caning and that on a different occasion he encroached on his "personal space".

Many have pointed to Roebuck's fall out with Ian Botham as an example of his intransigence. Botham describes Roebuck as "a very strange person" in the piece in The Cricketer this month - perhaps a more charitable view and one that seems to be shared by several (like Cricinfo's podcast, or Gideon Haigh's view on World Cricket Watch) is that he was a loner.

It would appear that he was somewhat troubled, but despite that, he wrote the foreword to David Frith's By His Own Hand in 1991 (later republished as Silence of the Heart with a foreword by Mike Brearley after Frith and Roebuck fell out) - a book highlighting the increased propensity for cricketers to commit suicide. As reported in this piece on Livemint, Roebuck wrote “Cricketers are supposed to be simple, even gung-ho, in sexual matters as in everything else. Yet cricket—and most cricketers—has its dark secrets, its skeletons." Sadly he also finished his foreword with the words "Some people have predicted a gloomy end for this writer. It will not be so.’’

With a tunnel-focus on cricket, even Botham must be sad that those words have turned out to be incorrect. However, with allegations of sexual assault still outstanding, it's possible that Itai Gondo isn't.