Love Michael Clarke’s batting, admire Michael Hussey

 

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By Spiro Zavos, 14 Nov 2007 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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The two things I took out of Australia’s overwhelming victory over a highly-regarded Sri Lanka are first, that the selectors seem to have done the impossible and found very good replacements for the great players who left the side at the end of last season; and second, the sheer joy and pleasure Michael Clarke provides when he plays a long innings.

Neville Cardus, the flowery cricket and music writer for The Manchester Guardian, once wrote about how he used to pray when England played Australia for Victor Trumper, the batting genius from Paddington, Sydney, to make a century but for England to win.

This prayer has the essential truth about cricket in it, that the result is important and so, too, are the aesthetics of the game.

When it comes to batsmen there are those who are remembered because of the vast number of runs they made. And there are the handful of others whose memory is forever green and sweet because of the way they played. Michael Hussey falls into the category of the prolific and industrious scorer. And Michael Clarke into the category of player whose exciting and beautiful batting style is far more memorable than the quantity of runs he scores.

Hussey seems to me to bat like a production line. Each stroke is exactly right. The placement is precise. Scoring runs seems to be predictable and inevitable and somehow the same all the time.

Clarke, though, is unpredictable and not inevitable with his run-scoring. His average now in test cricket is up to 46, thanks to the not out 145 in the first test of this summer which moved him 4 points up from 42. Hussey, thanks to his century, now averages 82.38, a phenomenal average that is second only to Don Bradman for a batsman scoring over 1000 runs in test cricket.

Hussey’s century took 196 balls to make, one ball fewer than Phil Jacques’ 197 balls for his century. Clarke’s century took 164 balls. But the interesting statistic in this is that the first 50 took 101 balls and the second 50 only 63 balls.

With Hussey there is no great excitement generated about his play. He has taken the risks out of his game by developing an exact technique and temperament that has him concentrating fiercely on each ball and playing each ball on its merits. The predominant image you have of Hussey is the way he mouths the mantra ‘Watch the ball’ with a Tibetan prayer-wheel insistence.

Clarke often doesn’t play the ball on its merits. A good delivery will be banged to the boundary, to the bewilderment of the bowler and the delight of spectators. But sometimes a poor delivery will get him out. On the first ball after lunch on the second day of the test Clarke charged Murali, slogged across the line and was lucky to keep the ball along the ground. It was the shot of a backyard cricketer. At the end of the over he walked down the pitch with a naughty-boy grin on his face to chat with the grimly-obsessed Hussey.

Of course, Hussey’s sheer weight of runs makes him a more valuable player than Clarke, generally. But there are times when the impudence and wit of Clarke’s batting will make him the match-winner on a pitch or in conditions that will defeat even Hussey. In the same way, Stan McCabe played a couple of match-winning innings that were beyond Don Bradman, as the great batsman conceded as McCabe blazed away against a ferocious England Bodyline attack.

For me, anyway, this is why I love watching Michael Clarke bat and will turn off the television set often when he is dismissed. You never know what is going to happen, or not happen. And it is all done with style and panache.

I admire Michael Hussey’s play and appreciate its value to the team but I often don’t bother to watch as he accumulates his runs.

My justification for this heresy is that when a Japanese master makes a pot he always puts a slight flaw in the work on the grounds that perfection is boring.

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