Is Michael Clarke set for another big score at Perth?

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 13 Jan 2012 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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Is Michael Clarke set for another big score at Perth? + enlarge image

Australia's cricket captain Michael Clarke celebrates. AP Photo/Rob Griffith

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Michael Clarke’s mammoth 329 not out at the SCG during the second Australia-India Test in the 2011/2012 summer boosted his Test average from 46 to 48. This is likely to be a one-off huge increase.

Outside of Don Bradman throughout his entire, and the occasional brilliant season by individual players, it is most unusual for a huge score to be followed by a sequence of very large scores.

There was a lot of talk about Sachin Tendulkar being a latter-day Bradman with his 99 centuries in international cricket. This is nonsense. Anthony Shillinglaw, an expert on Bradman’s unusual (and rarely copied) method of batting, ‘the Continuous Rotary Batting Process,’ has sent out statistics on Bradman’s which put all talk about comparisons into the ridiculous category.

Take this one Bradman statistic, for instance:  first-class matches 338, not outs 43, highest score 452, aggregate 28,067, average 95.1.

For most batsmen, and Bradman again has to be regarded as an exception, the physical and mental effort involved in scoring a massive scores in a Test match, say, seems to effect their ability to score heavily for a while after. It’s as if batsmen have a quantum of runs in their locker in a season. If they exceed their average contribution for a match too excessively, then the ‘law of averages’ pulls them back for a while with low scores.

Towards the end of 2003, for instance, Matthew Hayden scored 380 against Zimbabwe at the WACA. He batted only five sessions. The physical and mental effort involved with the innings did seem to have an impact on his future scoring. Towards the end of 2004, according to his Wikipedia entry he ‘suffered a considerable form-slump’ which continued into 2005 when he averaged only 35.33 in the five-Test Ashes series.

Hayden scored a career-saving 138 in the Fifth Test at the Oval. Then in the 2005/2006 season it was business as usual for Hayden with three Test hundreds in three successive innings.

Incidentally, statistics suggest that Hayden has to be considered one of the greatest openers in the history of Test cricket. He scored the second most runs of any Test opener at an average of 50.7.

I reckon that because openers face the new ball and because it is hard for them to get not outs that an opener’s average should be boosted by about 8 runs an innings to get a fair balance with players batting down the list, like Clarke. Hayden also has the third best conversion rate in Test cricket for a long-term player with a century every 3.13 innings, behind Bradman (who else?) at 1.79 and Clyde Walcott at 2.93.

Getting back to Clarke, he has a history, as LeftArmSpinner pointed out on The Roar after the 329 not out score, of putting together a ‘mixed bag of high and low scores’. This season, for instance, against Sri Lanka he scored 23, 60, 13, 6, 112: against South Africa, 151, 2, 11, 2: against New Zealand, 139, 22, 0: and against India 31, 1 and 329.

So we have 15 innings here, four centuries and five scores under 10, seven under 14, with one not not out, for an impressive average of over 61 but with a median score of 22/23.

To a certain extent, Clarke’s method of going for the bowling from the start does not favour the accumulation of a huge average. He is a Doug Walters type of batsman. He scores so quickly, often in situations where no one else can get going, that he can win Tests with his batting.

The problem with this is that, so far, he has lacked consistency in his scoring. Perhaps you can’t have both, the flashing, helter-skelter scoring method and a high strike rate of big innings. But this is something that Clarke will have to work out as his career continues.

When Ponting and Michael Hussey drop out of the Test side, whenever that will be, Clarke will be left as the senior batsman and the only great batsman left in the side. He will probably have to take a bit more care about building bigger scores than he does now.

Perth’s WACA, a ground that gives full value to stroke-makers, is as good a time as any for Clarke to accept the problems he creates for his side when, as has happened this season, he has too many failures getting going. Once he has got past 31, his next ‘lowest’ scores have been 60 and 112.

A bit more care then in the early stages of his innings should be in order. For once Clarke gets going he scores so quickly he gives his bowlers plenty of time to get opposing sides out. As well, there is no better sight in world cricket, in terms of aesthetics, of Clarke in the zone smoothly, seemingly effortlessly and with great elegance, dispatching the bowling to all parts of the field.

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