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“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Those words from The Dark Knight, spoken by crusading district attorney Harvey Dent after Bruce Wayne asks him his opinion on the Australian cricket captaincy, have rarely seemed more apt than in the distressing case of Michael Clarke, and the central question facing us as a nation: will he stay or will he go?
There are of course three traditional ways for an Australian captain to end his career:
The Tubby-Tugga triumphal tour, in which a skipper, after a protracted and dismal form slump, triggering loud calls for his sacking, hits a magnificent fighting century to save his position and secure a peaceful exit a year or so later, revered by all.
The gibbering wreck, in which the captain, mind and spirit broken by continued losses and seemingly unending personal failure, bursts into tears and runs wailing into the annals of history.
The Allan Border, in which the captain says, “f— you” to everyone and goes golfing.
It is to be devoutly hoped that Clarke can emulate Steve Waugh and Mark Taylor and salvage his place, not only in the team but in the history books, with a performance of typical pluck and tenacity at Trent Bridge.
It is also to be hoped that in another sense he doesn’t emulate Waugh and Taylor at all, given that both those men struck their career-saving centuries in Test matches which Australia lost.
Thus does Clarke have the fiercest of furnaces to pass through: it is a matter of utmost urgency that he rediscover a skerrick of the batting form that saw him scale the most rarefied heights of batting excellence; but it’s also imperative that he focus not too narrowly on his personal travails, given that the team needs him to lead them to a victory lest the Ashes head back to the decidedly alien surrounds of so-called ‘England’ for the immediate future.
It is a horrible place Clarke finds himself in, the nightmarish flipside to every child’s sporting dream. He must be fearing a sad end to what should be a glorious story, wherein the multitudes remember not the blazing strokes that announced his arrival in Bangalore 2004, or the majestic serenity of that triple century in Sydney, or even the sublime skill of his 151 in Cape Town; but rather the abiding memory is of a battered, broken man dragging his bat back to the pavilion after the latest proof of his unsuitability for cricket at this level.
For a man who had shown so conclusively and so elegantly over the years his mastery of the game, for the question to arise of whether he even possesses the physical capability to play it must burn sharply. And yet for most champions, that question comes up sooner or later.
How galling must it be, moreover, to have fulfilled your lifelong dream, and to be told that you have a responsibility to give it up? It may be the worst part of the decline of every great sportsperson, the insistence that they choose the moment of their own demise. It can hardly be surprising that someone with the burning desire needed to achieve the highest honours will have the burning desire to keep doing it as long as he can: it’s a painful fact that selectors at these times seek to vacate their responsibilities and hope that he will fall on his own sword.
To save himself, and possibly the Ashes, Clarke will need to draw on every hidden reservoir of mental and physical strength he ever had. He will need to clear his mind of the cares that cloud it, to somehow think not of all the reasons he has to make runs in order to actually make them. He will need to overcome his aching back and force his feet to remember how to move. He will need to relearn the simplest and most difficult art of all: watching the damn ball.
And most importantly, and most terrifyingly, he will need to be lucky. Joe Root was out for a duck in Cardiff, until the ball bounced from Haddin’s glove, and he hit a century instead. At Edgbaston the ball whistled past English edges more times than one cared to count, and frequently the very next ball sped to the boundary. Clarke had neither the luck of poor fielding, nor the fortune of the air swing, in the second innings. The ball caught the edge, and sped groundwards, only to be plucked just above the grass.
The Australian captain may walk out at Trent Bridge, play and miss 10 times in his first 15 balls, and go on to hit a hundred, and the early mistakes will mean nothing. He may poke his first ball to slip, get dropped, and plunder the bowling from that moment on, and his fatal error will be a footnote to his redemption.
Or he may play with supreme confidence, strike every ball in the middle of the bat for several overs, and then make one slight miscalculation, and his career will be over.
That’s the hellish part of this terrible, beautiful game we call cricket: the woefully out-of-form may succeed if the balls they miss are wide and the balls they edge fly through gaps; the brilliantly in-touch may fail if the one split-second their judgment wavers coincides with a well-aimed delivery or secure hands.
And there is nothing Michael Clarke can do about that. He has to set out in the fourth Test knowing his career might be about to end, knowing his legacy as captain is at risk, knowing the Ashes are on the brink of being forfeited, knowing that every ball could spell destruction for himself and his entire team… And knowing that there is no possible way he can guarantee his survival.
He may play well, or he may play badly, and it may not make any difference.
Harvey Dent went on to become the villain Two-Face, who would flip a coin to decide whether his victims lived, died, or batted first on a greentop. Right now Michael Clarke is staring down the barrel of Two-Face’s gun, and he must be struggling to remember why he took this stupid game up in the first place.