Michael Clarke has retired. A day we all knew would come, a degenerative and troubled back made sure of that, but the captain’s decline has been swift and marked.
It seemed a fait accompli that Clarke would finish with 10,000 Test runs and 30 hundreds; as it is, he fell short of both.
As someone still in their teens, I have always had an affinity with Clarke, because my love and interest for the game grew linear with his career. My other cricketing heroes: Ricky Ponting, Matt Hayden, Adam Gilchrist, Brett Lee, Shane Warne and co all started well before I was ghost batting in my mirror, but Clarke was the ever-present man.
The public however, didn’t warm the same way as I did. He started as the quintessential Australian batsman. Young, precocious, talented, and ear marked for higher honours from an early age, striding the path set by the greats before him.
He slotted in to that team, the modern invincibles who had a star on every turn. He proceeded to do what no Australian batsman has done since, and treated India like his own personal playground.
He danced, pranced, hoped and skipped his way to 151 on debut in Bangalore. He had magically quick feet.
He had blonde hair and a stud in the ear, and the kid they called Pup had game. Then he went eight Tests without a hundred after that magical start. He was dropped after the 2005 Ashes and the beginning of the Australian summer against the West Indies. The public, for the first time, thought he was all show and no substance.
Clarke fought his way back, and then just made runs. But that’s all they were, just runs. They weren’t Steve Waugh in a crisis runs. They weren’t back to the wall Allan Border runs, and they weren’t authoritative, counter attacking Ricky Ponting runs. For some reason, they weren’t enough and the public always wanted more.
Maybe it was because Clarke first arrived into a team full of rugged Aussies, who do it the ‘Australian way’- macho, tough, beer drinking, ‘over my dead body’ cricket. Clarke, with his blonde tips, earring, penchant for fast cars, fancy restaurants and sharing an arm with a model girlfriend, didn’t really fit that bill.
The hair went, shaved and brown in late 2008, in an effort to be more loved. Then he started making some more runs, but it was still not enough. His long, punchy drives through cover didn’t rid of the whispers around him.
Clarke through all this became the captain in waiting to Ricky Ponting, and after the Tasmanian averaged 16.14 in his last Ashes series of 2010, the man they still called Pup stepped into a man’s job.
He became Australian Test captain for the fifth Test in the series, after Ponting batted in Melbourne with a broken finger and approximately 2000 jabs of cortisone.
After the series, a newspaper ran a poll on who the public wanted to be the next captain. Cameron White, who wasn’t in the side and hadn’t played Tests since 2008, gathered 40 per cent of the vote. Clarke, averaging 50 at the time, polled just 15 per cent.
He was booed at the MCG in a one dayer against England, for no other reason other than not being the person that people wanted our captain to be, almost a year to the day after he had an altercation with Simon Katich in the SCG dressing room.
While the public wasn’t warming to him, Clarke warmed to the captaincy. He made 112 in Sri Lanka in his first series as captain, then made 151 in Cape Town on a green seamer, as one of only three batsman to make double figures. Clarke was bowled for that 151 in the morning, as was the team, then were all skittled again for 47 later that evening.
Clarke then made 329* against India at the SCG in 2012, and the musings about him seemed to stop. He was morphing into a modern great like those before. He scored big, telling runs, just what the public wants. The following summer he made two double hundreds and two more hundreds on top of that, and struggled to mistime a ball.
Ponting had vacated the stage, and it was all set up for Clarke to lead Australia into the spotlight.
But then the runs were harder to come by. He gave up Twenty20 cricket when everyone was falling in love with it, and those quick feet were no longer so golden.
The Ashes were regained in a whitewash, and he was battered and bruised on his way to 161 once more in Cape Town, surviving Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel and a fractured shoulder.
He was then faced with his greatest battle, and produced his finest knock. The passing of close friend and teammate Phil Hughes rocked Clarke, yet his strength during the period will go down in the history books.
Nursing a back that refused to move and dodgy hamstrings, Clarke made a hundred in the first Test after’s Hughes’ death, in memory of his “little brother”.
Clarke was at odds with selectors over his recovery time he was granted to make it back for a home World Cup campaign, which didn’t please people, even after calling everyone’s whipping boy Shane Watson, “a cancer” on the team two years prior.
Clarke did make it back, and led Australia to World Cup victory with a half century in the final. But the big runs, and runs when Australia needed them and when the public wanted them, dried up, and his decline in England was sudden.
Like Ponting, Clarke finishes his last Ashes series with an average of 16. Some dismissals stood out more than others. He skipped down to Mooen Ali, a trundling offie at best, and chipped the ball back to him at Cardiff.
Eleven years ago, Clarke faced Anil Kumble’s 95kp/h leg spinning hand grenades, and was drop kicking him over the sight screen. To watch Clarke battle, scrap and mistime just about everything was hard to watch, and a flashing blade at a wide ball off Stuart Broad at 5/29 was the final act of failed endearment to the public, trying to play the’ Australian way’ – and once more failing.
That Clarke was and is ridiculed for being who he is, is disappointing, for the man peeled off 28 Test hundreds. Yet he was never fully accepted. He was not ‘Captain Grumpy’, he wasn’t so tough they called him ‘Tugga’, and he wasn’t a lad, he wasn’t a ‘Punter’.
He wasn’t ashen faced, steely eyed. He was flashy, not archetypical, because he was our first Gen Y cricketer, and was targeted for it. Even moving from a brilliant backward point fielder with a rocket arm to a rigid first slipper with a three day growth, couldn’t change his image.
Nothing could, he was Michael Clarke and Michael Clarke didn’t fit the ‘Australian way’ for the public.
But seeing Clarke in Nottingham at second slip dead pan, you could sense the waning of the mind, of nothing left to give, through the space age sunglasses and beneath the brimmed hat. Collar up, stubble formed, vest over a long sleever, he soldiered on, and did finally act the Australian way; he fell on his sword.
Enough was enough. Well played skipper.
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While a premature retirement isn’t the solution, he or England want, he may be forced into it if he can’t maintain a long run of matches.
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