Roebuck: A brave, warped, essentially unknowable man

The journalist had a need for acceptance by the cricket community that he served with such thoughtfulness, but he was never fully accepted

I'VE TAKEN a long time to be able to write about cricket journalist Peter Roebuck's suicide. There was so much written at the time of his death by cricket reporters and muckraking news journalists that I didn't want to get drawn into the debate about the sordid details of his private life.

Roebuck surely took advantage of his position as an influential cricket correspondent to attract and befriend young Zimbabwean men. What happened afterwards is best left to the more salacious edges of our imagination.

It was more complicated than him ''grooming" his young Zimbabwean friends on Facebook, though. Roebuck was notoriously averse to press conferences - and rightly so - but on one of the only occasions in which he stooped to cover one at the Sydney Cricket Ground, the Zimbabwe issue was up for discussion.

Haroon Lorgat was at his dismal unctuous best as head of the ICC and though very little transpired other than a quick volley of hard fire from Malcolm Conn, one of the Aussie cricket journalists, it was clear Roebuck felt passionately about Zimbabwe cricket. He would argue about it and push his erudite agenda, and certainly used it as a stick with which to beat the ICC. Quite why he was as passionate about the Zimbabwe issue as he was, I don't know. This was Roebuck in a nutshell. I covered cricket with him on three continents, shared press boxes and airport waiting rooms with him, went to parties where he held forth. I knew he loved Bob Dylan, drove a beaten-up Toyota Conquest (as I once did) and had a penchant for cheesy hats.

He had terrible dress sense; he was fearlessly opinionated yet managed to be open about admitting his failures of understanding. Could I put my hand to my heart and say I knew him? No I couldn't. He was, I think, essentially unknowable, a fabulously brave but strangely warped man, forever unable to come to terms with his sexuality.

Part of this unknowability arose, I think, from the fact that he was a cricket intellectual. Ed Smith, who played briefly for England six or seven years ago, wrote a perceptive piece along these lines in The Guardian before Christmas. In it he argued that Roebuck had a very ordinary need for acceptance by the cricket community which he served with such thoughtfulness. The problem was that he was never fully accepted. Details of his private life forever leaked into his working life and people were wary, as one would expect them to be.

He was never flippant and this also didn't help. Journalists won't readily admit it, but they can be as glib and bitchy and gossipy as the next person. Roebuck's worst excess was that he had blind spots. But he never stooped to sensationalism or tabloid excess. He wasn't interested in news, he was interested in making sense of cricket, of putting it in context, of weighing a player in relation to his best self, his team, the opposition and the pantheon of stars shining in the galaxy behind him.

Wanting to belong made his pain all the more acute. I can only guess at his private agonies.

The early stories and obituaries rather gleefully unpicked the man's contradictions. But is a man not humanised by his contradictions? Roebuck certainly had his. The cricket world is worse off for his absence because there aren't enough journalists around ready to expose the cosy deals and the all-expenses-paid shopping trips for the administrators' wives. He was a trustworthy voice in an increasingly compromised cricket world.

I spoke to Roebuck at Newlands the day before he died, during the first test against Australia, both of us recovering our wits after the surreal previous day. We had a long chat about CSA and their members' need to drag their organisation through the mud. He wanted to know why CSA hadn't made the KPMG forensic audit public; I replied tartly that it surely wasn't in their interests to do so.

In the wake of subsequent events, I found his question a little desperate, the question of a man who had nothing to ask but all to say. I will never know, of course, because the next thing I knew, he jumped out of a sixth-story hotel window to a horrible and painful death.