RIP Peter Roebuck

[Booney]

I'll reserve my comments on the man until more information comes to hand.

As a commentator, there are many better.

[saintal]

Very sad. Didn’t mind his commentary.

Looks like he had something to hide doesn't it? Pretty extreme way of dealing with it.

[McAlmanac]

Excellent article by Mike Atherton on the subject.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/sport/certainty-masked-peter-roebucks-troubled-soul/story-e6frg7t6-1226194500991

[CoverKing]

Spoken to by Police about an alleged sexual assault apparently

[mickey]

Excellent article by Mike Atherton on the subject.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/sport/certainty-masked-peter-roebucks-troubled-soul/story-e6frg7t6-1226194500991

What's with having to subscribe to read it... cut n paste please!

[heater31]

Excellent article by Mike Atherton on the subject.

[url]http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/sport/certainty-masked-peter-roebucks-troubled-soul/story-e6frg7t6-1226194500991[/url]

What's with having to subscribe to read it... cut n paste please!

News Ltd want us to pay for online content, as no one buys their fish wrap anymore. Give it a few more years and we will have to pay for the capital tabloids as well.


Yes please post the entire article or another link.

[Jimmy_041]

Certainty masked Peter Roebuck's troubled soul
BY: MIKE ATHERTON
From: The Times November 14, 2011 12:34PM

FIRST "Picca", now "Rupert"; it has been a bad few weeks for those who played and followed English cricket in the 1980s.

Peter Roebuck, singular, complex and tortured, could not have been more different from the genial, sociable and straightforward Graham Dilley - but then cricket dressing rooms have always opened their doors to humanity in all its wonderful and sometimes tragic complexity.

Roebuck's death yesterday - he leapt from his hotel room in Claremont, Cape Town - did not come as a complete shock. The circumstances that compelled it remain shrouded in mystery, but those who played with and then worked with Roebuck would have recognised a troubled soul.

I was reminded on first hearing the news of Mike Brearley's words, written recently on a different topic, that one can never take human appearances for granted. Scratch away the surface and all manner of peculiarities emerge.

In print, Roebuck could be opinionated and full of certainty. His private life was anything but that.

The son of teachers, he had an obvious yearning to help young people, as many of those whom he assisted would confirm and as his houses in Sydney and Pietermaritzburg, always populated by young men, would suggest.

There were clearly darker impulses, though, as his suspended sentence for common assault in 2001, when he was found to have given three 19-year-olds in his care corporal punishment, implied.

Roebuck was a significant cricketer in his own right, opening the batting for Somerset in dogged fashion for many years and then captaining them at a turbulent time.

Those who remember Somerset's glory days in the late 1970s and early 1980s under Ian Botham, Viv Richards and Joel Garner would hold Roebuck responsible, as Botham did and still does, for the decline that followed when Roebuck decided that the county needed to turn in a different direction.

The story was more complicated than Botham lets on. Never a great communicator, no doubt Roebuck handled things poorly, but his determination to chart a course he believed in, and one that put him at odds with powerful personalities and the public, spoke of a man of courage and conviction.

Fearlessness was his greatest attribute as a journalist and commentator, twin roles to which he turned after ending his playing career in 1991 and for which he will be principally remembered. He had written during his playing days and his efforts marked him out as a ferociously intelligent and curious observer of the game and those who played it.

His diary of the 1983 season, It Never Rains, is a classic of its kind. As Gideon Haigh said yesterday: "I don't think anyone in cricket writing had a voice like Peter's when he arrived on the scene in the early 1980s. You only have to contrast the way we wrote about cricket in the 1970s to the way we write about it now - Peter has been responsible for a lot of those developments."

He wrote with flair and was not afraid, as Gunter Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning German author, suggested writers should not be, of spitting in the soup of the high and mighty.

Inevitably, the focus of what he wrote changed over time. He became more overtly political, less interested in the nuances and niceties of technique. Cricket, to him, remained much more than a game and wherever he sensed danger he was apt to remind people of it. Invariably his instincts were sound and the targets of his disgust were well chosen.

In recent years his targets were, in no particular order: the corrupt and nasty regime that ran Zimbabwe cricket into the ground; the corruption of South Africa's cricketing administration; those dark forces, recently highlighted in the trial of the Pakistan cricketers, that preyed on young and vulnerable players; the boorishness of the Australia team; the fecklessness of the ICC; former cricketers in the media with conflicts of interest; greed of administrators; the plight of the Tamils. In all cases, his opinions were harsh, his instincts sound and his voice listened to.

In only one respect did his professionalism let him down and that was when he came to write about England. He could never quite get over the bitterness of rejection, both as a player and a writer.

Accordingly, he viewed English cricket and England the same way. He considered them as coarse, having lost their way and in permanent decline - although the cricket played by the England team on their most recent tour to Australia forced him to soften his views somewhat. It was a shame, though, that he and the country of his birth were never reconciled.

Roebuck's passing adds one more to the total of cricketing suicides, chronicled by David Frith in his book, Silence of the Heart. Frith wondered how many had been helped on their way by the particularly cruel effects cricket has on those who play it - the long hours, the travel, the waiting, the mind games, the daily pain of rejection (for a batsman, that is), the complete absorption that leaves a vacuum when retirement comes.

The question does not apply to Roebuck. In many ways, he was at his happiest talking about and writing about the game. It was the rest of life he didn't quite master.

Only four years ago, writing after the death of Bob Woolmer during the World Cup in the Caribbean, Roebuck said that all cricketers, to some degree or other, die a death in far-off, forgotten hotel rooms. He was talking about the loneliness of the job. Of course, his own death in an hotel in Cape Town now gives those words a particularly cruel twist. Far-off, for sure, but at least a fine body of work means that he will not be completely forgotten.

The Times

[Booney]

Interesting article. Implies enough to suggest less than savoury undertones being the reasons for Roebuck taking his own life.

[whufc]

Advertiser reporting that Police were in the room when Roebuck took his leap to death.

All very strange.

[Gozu]

Excellent article by Mike Atherton on the subject.

[url]http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/sport/certainty-masked-peter-roebucks-troubled-soul/story-e6frg7t6-1226194500991[/url]

What's with having to subscribe to read it... cut n paste please!

News Ltd want us to pay for online content, as no one buys their fish wrap anymore. Give it a few more years and we will have to pay for the capital tabloids as well.


Yes please post the entire article or another link.

If you want to get around the Ltd News/Australian paywall when on the page just highlight the address of the article, click copy, go to Google, paste the address into Google and then click on the link. Bang, full article.

[pels]

Very sad news, enjoyed his speical comments on the ABC and articles he wrote for the Fairfax press.

[The Sleeping Giant]

I love these threads. Posters are quick to say how great the deceased was, then the story starts to come out.

[Pup]

I love these threads. Posters are quick to say how great the deceased was, then the story starts to come out.

I don't think anyone is commenting on the person because most people know there is something not quite right more the commentator and what he gave to cricket.

[Johno6]

I love these threads. Posters are quick to say how great the deceased was, then the story starts to come out.

dont u know when someone dies how awesome they become

[The Sleeping Giant]

I love these threads. Posters are quick to say how great the deceased was, then the story starts to come out.

I don't think anyone is commenting on the person because most people know there is something not quite right more the commentator and what he gave to cricket.

He did alright out of cricket.

[The Sleeping Giant]

He was once described the Australian cricket team as a pack of wild dogs.

[McAlmanac]

He was once described the Australian cricket team as a pack of wild dogs.

Precisely why he was so highly regarded - not afraid to take the contrary view.

[The Sleeping Giant]

Contrary view doesn't mean its correct. Anyway, see what other stories are in the next few days.

[Punk Rooster]

Peter Roebuck

[Coach Bombay]

Peter Roebuck

If some of those things are true then I think him dying is a positive to humanity in some regards