Cricket officials might have to seek Lara Bingle’s advice to determine who captains Australia’s Test team.

What other conclusion can be drawn from Cricket Australia’s bizarre new policy of selecting a troubled player – a vice-captain at that – then merely hoping he will be able to turn up?

That’s what has happened in the case of Michael Clarke, who quit the nation’s one-day team in New Zealand this week and flew home to console the publicity magnet who doubles as his fiancee.

Lara Bingle told a women’s magazine she felt “violated” after nude shower photos taken by AFL footballer Brendan Fevola during their brief affair in 2006 were circulated privately, not to mention later publicly in the same magazine.

Clarke was sufficiently upset to do what few, if any, elite players have ever done – curtail a tour for personal reasons other than matters of life and death.

Officials maintain Clarke is being shown the same sort of compassion previously granted to captain Ricky Ponting and former bowling great Glenn McGrath.

But to speak of Clarke’s travails in the same breath as the death of a close aunt or a wife’s breast cancer might strike some as offensive.

That’s not to trivialise the palpitations of the heart being suffered by a young couple in their twenties.

Maybe Clarke does need time out to resolve his personal problems.

But if he can’t give a firm commitment to the game, why name him in the Test team to play in New Zealand next week?

Officials announcing the Australian squad were unable to say for sure, when pressed, whether Clarke would be flying back across the Tasman with fellow Test players next Sunday or Monday, or indeed whether he would even make it to Wellington for the first Test on Friday week.

They were merely “hopeful” he would be there.

This is courting disaster.

What if Ponting, in the meantime, slips on the proverbial banana skin?

What if the captain rolls an ankle on a cricket ball, as McGrath once did on the morning of a match, or becomes indisposed for one of a hundred reasons?

Who will then assume the captaincy, a post often ranked the second highest in the land behind the prime minister’s?

A poor pup whose private life looks like a dog’s breakfast?

That call could well rest with a 22-year-old swimwear model who has been flipping the bird to paparazzi outside the couple’s luxurious Bondi pad.

Chairman of selectors Andrew Hilditch should have Lara’s number handy, just in case.

He might have to give her a bingle.

© AAP 2012

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