Inside the curious disappearance of Paul Collingwood: The x-rated voice note, late-night antics and strip bar visit that have made the England coach a 'liability'

The Australians have been very up front about Pat Cummins being missing from their squad for the first Ashes Test, but the mystery surrounding a significant 49-year-old England absentee shows no sign of being solved.

Daily Mail Sport understands it is extremely unlikely that assistant coach Paul Collingwood will be included when the ECB announces the backroom team for the series Down Under, in the next few weeks. That will mean his absence from the England coaching team – from which he disappeared ‘for personal reasons’ on the first day of the one-off Test against Zimbabwe in Nottingham on May 22 – extending to beyond a year by next summer.

When members of the legendary 2005 Ashes squad got together this summer to reminisce, be interviewed and photographed 20 years on, Collingwood was conspicuous by his absence. His last public media appearance was 10 months ago during England’s third Test in Hamilton, New Zealand when, like other assistant coaches, he was asked to answer for some poor performances.

Collingwood declared Ben Stokes was so fit that he could bowl ‘as many overs as he feels he needs to’. Stokes left the field, distraught and in pain, with a hamstring issue the following day. Collingwood said that the team, 2-0 up in the series, had been motivated to record a 3-0 whitewash. They lost the third Test by 423 runs.

Shane Warne would have had some fun with that. Just as he did when Collingwood received an MBE for being a member of the 2005 Ashes squad, after coming in for the final Test and blocking for a draw to help England win the series. Warne observed that an MBE for scoring 17 across both innings of one Test of an entire series should stand for: ‘Must Be Embarrassing'.

But the sudden absence of Collingwood is curious. He was the first England captain to win a World Cup – the Twenty20 version in the Caribbean in 2010 – as well as a member of victorious England Ashes squads in 2009 and 2011.

That playing pedigree created the prospect of him becoming England coach early in 2022, when he was appointed to the position on an interim basis after a 4-0 Ashes series humbling in Australia brought Chris Silverwood’s departure.

But in what has become a distinct pattern, Collingwood’s nocturnal habits have made him a liability. Within 56 days of him being appointed temporary head coach for a series in West Indies, images emerged of him kissing a woman in the sea on a Barbados beach. His England side had just lost by 10 wickets in the decisive third Test.

Neither did leading by example off the field seem to come naturally as a player. Little more than 24 hours before captaining England to defeat in a 2007 T20 World Cup match against hosts South Africa, in which he was dismissed for a golden duck, Collingwood was pictured in a Cape Town strip club called Mavericks.

Collingwood, who had married his then-wife, Vicky, in Cape Town two years earlier, said: ‘I was taken to an inappropriate bar and when I realised that, I got out of there.' 

In mitigation, he said he had been on the golf course at 7.30am the morning after his visit to the club, which employed 100 lap dancers mostly from Russia and eastern Europe, and offered a private room for 'more exotic performances'.

‘In today's environment that was unacceptable and I hold my hands up to that,’ Collingwood declared.

He was fined £1,000 and nothing more was said, as he became England’s part-time fielding coach while still a player, then a permanent part of the coaching setup after his international retirement, aged 34.

The embarrassing episodes have been viewed as nothing more than ‘Colly being Colly’, and something to celebrate.

Graeme Swann was beside himself with mirth in April 2023 when on an episode of the Rig Biz podcast he described being introduced to a recent audio tape of Collingwood in a room with several women during two hours of sexual antics. It is unclear whether the episode occurred during an England tour, though Swann said Collingwood was ‘a good lad and a great tourist’.

Swann related how he had been socialising with Brett Lee, Chris Gayle and Scott Styris when they told him about the ‘Paul Collingwood voice note’ and that ‘the second it started I’m like, “I know where this is going. I can just predict where".’ 

Swann told the podcasters for their banterish show: ‘Paul is driven! He’s recently divorced and he’s very driven. He’s a single man these days, so let’s face it, it sounded like he had a great night with the girls.’ Well, at least Warne would have approved of this.

Collingwood’s ex-wife, Vicky – an HR administrator, with whom he has three daughters – only appeared in the public eye when the couple lost £300,000 by investing more than £650,000 with a Derbyshire ‘adviser-to-the-stars’. 

In 2013, the Collingwoods pursued Roderick Langham, whose Cheshire company put the cash into 'high risk and unregulated collective investment' funds, through the courts. But he and others who pursued Langham, including James Anderson and several footballers, were told to settle out of court as there was not enough money to pay them all back.

In his playing pomp Collingwood earned a six-figure central contract salary from the ECB and was paid tens of thousands simply for giving Yahoo! four square inches of advertising space on the back of his bat. He earned £60,000 from a season in the IPL with Delhi Daredevils despite barely playing. One-off bonuses included £30,000 for winning the 2005 Ashes.

Collingwood seemed made for life. He owned a six-bedroom detached house with views across sweeping Northumbrian countryside in the tiny hamlet of Hindley. He owned, and let, a smaller place across the road. He spent £50,000 to join Loch Lomond Golf Club. Clothes and golf have been his guilty pleasures, he has always liked to say.

His investment of several thousand pounds in a company called Portal Media, whose plan was to build kiosks nationwide allowing customers to download data on to flash memory cards, did not seem to concern him, despite hearing nothing more of them. The firm no longer appears to exist.

But the taxman certainly has been interested in Collingwood’s earnings. In 2008, HMRC opened an investigation into him assigning his sponsorship rights to a ‘personal services’ firm called ‘PDC rights’ – his initials – in which he was the sole shareholder, thus limiting the tax he paid.

Though HMRC closed the case the following year, it was revealed this month that a further Revenue investigation into his use of the same ‘personal services company’ to reduce his sponsorship income tax had resulted in him being hit with a £196,000 tax demand. 

Collingwood is being forced to pay this, having lost an appeal. It is thought that he was dealing with tax issues in London when absent from this summer’s Zimbabwe Test.

Payments he has received from sponsorship contracts with Slazenger, the Professional Cricketers’ Association ambassador programme and Clydesdale Bank must now be treated as self-employment income.

Collingwood said in one interview while still playing that he didn’t like the idea of an impending 50 per cent income tax band. ‘The 50 per cent rate of tax will affect me and is probably necessary, but I've asked my accountant to look into it,’ he said. But the loss of the HMRC case will hit him harder.

In the Brendon McCullum/Ben Stokes England setup, he has added characteristic juice to the team scene after hours, as well as batting and fielding advice. He’s made himself close to the pair, just as he did Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff in his England playing days.

Michael Vaughan recalled Collingwood remarking that ‘this drinking team has got a cricket problem’ after England lost a one-day series in New Zealand in 2007-08. His terrible banter and tendency to end up being the butt of the jokes have contributed to his popularity. 

England winning the T20 World Cup brought a visit to Downing Street, where the then Prime Minister David Cameron declared he was ‘proud to stand here with Colin Collingwood and all his boys.’

Collingwood tried to respond by getting the PM’s own name wrong but seemed unaware of what it actually was. He retorted: ‘Colin? Oh that’s ok David.’ His error was pointed out to him, to general amusement.

McCullum is likely to have batting and spin coaches Marcus Trescothick and Jeetan Patel with him in Australia. He is also accustomed to having temporary, ‘freelance’ coaches in the setup, though fast-bowling specialist Tim Southee - with the team for the imminent New Zealand white-ball tour - will not form part of the Ashes party, since he has a franchise playing commitment in the New Year.

The ECB indicated that the England coaching setup ‘can vary from time to time’ over a long winter and that ‘one or two positions on that support team were being finalised’, ahead of an announcement in the next few weeks.

Neither they nor Collingwood have been able to give any explanation for his absence and it would be unfair to speculate what it could conceivably be. But the one-time Ashes hero and World Cup winning coach is currently anything but expansive about all this, having - for the time being at least - vanished without trace.