75: Michael Clarke

115 matches. 8643 runs @ 49.1. 28 hundreds. Highest score: 329*

12 years. 4x good. 2x outstanding. 1x Bradman.

The discussion

The career arc of Michael Clarke is a fascinating story. From an early age it seemed as though he was not only destined to play for Australia, but also to captain the side. It was almost as if the cricketing media were trying to reinforce the perception that when a player received their cap for New South Wales, their Australian cap was in the same parcel.

Maybe that anointment was why Clarke appeared to be such a divisive character among fans. Or maybe it was his look — the platinum blond hair, a diamond earring, a Ferrari, a house in the ritzy Eastern Sydney suburbs, and an equally blonde, equally tanned model-cum-actress partner. Whatever it was, Michael Clarke divided Australian cricket fans perhaps more than any other player in a generation. While cricketers had sponsors in the past and had appeared in television adverts, Clarke took it to the next level.

The concept of a player as a ‘personal brand’ might not have started with Clarke (he can thank Michael Jordan for that), but he was pretty much the first Australian cricketer to truly leverage his on-field stardom to create a persona that he maximised commercially. Brand Michael Clarke didn’t sit well with a lot of Australian cricket fans, and some players as well.

As Richie Benaud would say, though, back to the cricket.

Regardless of how you feel about Michael Clarke the character, by the numbers, he had an excellent career. Across 115 Tests in just an 11-year international career, Clarke combined impressive overall numbers with strong averages — his batting average and frequency of hundreds stack up well against other great Hall of Fame batters. His peak series all feature multiple hundreds, and big hundreds at that.

Stu, the ever-astute editor of these articles, has asked me to recall what it was like to watch Michael Clarke. The first memory that came to mind was the famous call of ‘WAAAAIT ON!!!!’. Even when not taking a run, Clarke was always keen to exert his authority on the situation.[1] He was quick to everything. Quick to arrive at the crease, quick to use his feet; he had quick hands. Clarke didn’t possess tremendous power; he was more of a scalpel than a hacksaw or a sledgehammer. He was deft, he had great hands as I mentioned, and he had an excellent technique.

But it was Clarke’s footwork that was his best asset. His footwork to spin in particular was exquisite. To my mind, Michael Clarke had the best footwork against spin of any Australian cricketer that I remember. Check out these innings against England and South Africa.

That is some of the finest footwork to spin bowlers you could ever hope to see. His willingness to use his feet and come down the wicket to negate the spin meant that he could work the ball on both sides of the field. He wasn’t afraid to hit the ball over the infield, either. He didn’t let the spinner settle and could take advantage when they dropped shorter or tried to push the ball through quicker to negate that excellent footwork. His late cut was pure class. He’s the kind of player I would both love and hate to bowl to. You’d always feel like you’re in with a chance to take his wicket if you could get one past him, but time and time again he’d manipulate the ball past or over the field for another boundary.

For players looking to perfect their footwork against spin, look to Michael Clarke’s advice on footwork technique: make sure that your first step is a big step to the line of the ball, then you can make adjustments to get to the right length if you need to. If you get to the line of flight early, even if you are beaten in flight, you can still cover the ball with a defensive stroke, or the bat if needed.

Going back to his stats for a moment, one key point that I want to make here is the ratio of hundreds to fifties. It is extremely rare that a player has more hundreds than fifties in their career. Of all the Hall of Fame candidates, there are only 11 players for whom this is the case. And only four of those cricketers boast a better ratio than Michael Clarke’s 1.03. It’s an impressive stat because it shows that, once he got going, Clarke frequently went on to make hundreds, including 10 scores in excess of 150, three double centuries and a triple century. Let’s just pause and reflect that all four of those scores in excess of 200 came in one calendar year. These are big daddy hundreds — match-winning performances. The only reason that he’s not ranked in the top 35 in all the categories I took into account is because he converted so many of those fifties into hundreds, thus his number of fifties falls below that mark.

Under Clarke’s leadership, the Australian team was also very successful, boasting a 24-7-16 record. Without many of the legends of Australian cricket that featured in the sides led by Border, Taylor, Waugh and Ponting, Clarke’s side still won more than 50% of their Tests. For reference, Mark Taylor (perhaps Australia’s greatest tactical captain in the modern era) won 52% of his Tests as captain. Clarke won 51%, with arguably an inferior team to Mark Taylor’s side.

Despite those gaudy numbers as a player and a lot of team success, Clarke was very rarely a player (or captain) with a universal approval rating. Perhaps following on from the image of Steve Waugh, and to a lesser extent Ricky Ponting, was a big reason for this. Those hard-nosed Aussie battlers sat better with a cricket fandom that was a little slow to move with the changing persona of the Australian male. Ocker / blokeism was on the way out, the modern man was on the way in, and Michael Clarke appeared to be at the forefront. And it wasn’t just the fans. It also seemed clear that his persona and lifestyle caused some tension inside the dressing room, particularly with the ‘old-school’ camp that remained after the Ponting era. Was there division among the playing group? Was Clarke liked and respected by his teammates? That’s a hard one to answer from the outside. But at least two incidents in 2009 [2] [3] would suggest that Clarke’s relationship with his players wasn’t all beer and skittles.

There’s no doubt that a little controversy followed Michael Clarke throughout his career as captain. I’m not sure the Australian dressing room was ever united under Michael Clarke. Having said that, factions exist in almost any dressing room, and the Australian team under Steve Waugh (and likely Ricky Ponting too) also seemed to have two camps.

The verdict

Whether or not Michael Clarke is your cup of chamomile tea, he was an outstanding cricketer. His 8,600 runs, at an average of almost 50, with 28 Test hundreds (and some big daddy hundreds, as we mentioned) add up to a tremendous career. Look at the raw numbers with no name next to them and the case would be very simple.

At this point I will admit that perhaps I was a little unkind to Michael Clarke during the ‘Would you rather?’ discussion in the Neil Harvey review. I fairness, I don’t think this is a negative reflection on Clarke, rather that I wish I could have seen more of Harvey. I did quite enjoy watching Clarke, against spin in particular.

In fact, I started this write-up with a pretty blah memory of Michael Clarke as a cricketer. But having watched footage on YouTube of him racking up hundred after hundred, he grew on me once again. Run by run, boundary by boundary, hundred by hundred, my respect for Clarke grew to the point that I became a little wistful (see footnote number 1, I’m clearly pining for the Fjords as I write this).

I’ve come to really respect Michael Clarke as a cricketer — it cannot have been easy to follow a procession of Australian captains in Allan Border, Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting (three of them may or may not be fellow Hall of Famers). Clarke had a lot to live up to over his career. If he didn’t quite meet the public’s expectation of him, maybe that’s not on Clarke, but on us, the public, for setting our expectations at an unrealistic level. I think there was a definite bias in the greater cricket community against Clarke, at the very least a reluctance to give him his due as a cricketer. He wasn’t entirely responsible for Australia’s decline in the period after the en masse retirements of great (Hall of Fame, even) cricketers between 2006 and 2008, but he was partially responsible for some of the dysfunction in the dressing room in that era (in my view).

So, Michael Clarke at 75. Overrated, underrated? To any of you who say he was overrated, I say go back again and watch him play. Like it did for me, his footwork will dance its way into your cricketing heart, and I think you too might be convinced that he belongs as the first ‘Club’ member of our Hall of Fame.

In one word

Footwork

Notes

[1] I don’t know why, but since moving to New Zealand from Australia my call of ‘wait’ has adopted Michael Clarke levels of intensity. For some reason, my Northern drawl becomes more pronounced and I go ‘full Australian’. In Australia I’d never call ‘WAIT ONNNNNN’ or ‘NO RUUUUUUUNNNNN’ like Michael Clarke did throughout his international career. In Aotearoa, I find myself doing it all the time, and I have no idea why. Maybe we chalk it up to a lonely Aussie in a foreign land, among Antipodean brothers and sisters — ANZAC cousins, who in reality love nothing more than to sink the slipper into any Aussie they can. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the anti-Australian sentiment that pervades New Zealand sporting society. Maybe I’m just clinging to a memory of home.

[2] Michael Clarke and Simon Katich (the left-handed opening batter) were involved in an altercation in the SCG dressing room after a Test match in 2009. Clarke, having somewhere to be (allegedly a party on a yacht in Sydney harbour) was trying to hurry the post-Test celebrations along, and get to the singing of the team song, so he could skedaddle. Mike Hussey, guardian of the team song ‘Under the Southern Cross I Stand’ wouldn’t be hurried, he wanted to savour the victory with his teammates. What leads up to the incident is sketchy, but according to Simon Katich, personal words were spoken, which led to Clarke placing his hands on Katich. Their relationship has never been the same since, and Katich played very little Test cricket after Clarke assumed the full-time captaincy.

[3] Michael Clarke’s side in 2013 lost the second Test in India by an innings, having declared their first innings closed at 237-9 on the back of Clarke’s 91. India made 500+, and bowled Australia out cheaply for only 131. Following the rather humbling defeat, team management (chiefly coach Mickey Arthur) asked each player to do some homework — namely identify three areas that the team could improve on. Four players (vice-captain Shane Watson, Usman Khawaja, and bowlers Mitchell Johnson and James Pattinson) failed to turn in said homework, leading to disciplinary action. From the outside it all looked very juvenile. No sir, I didn’t turn in said homework, sir. Dog ate it, and all that. Shane Watson flew home as a result for the birth of his first child. Whether or not Captain Clarke was behind the homework assignment or the punishment that resulted, he was quoted as saying players had to uphere [sic] to team standards. The fractious Australian dressing room issues, which had been festering since the 2009 yacht cruise incident, became very public once more.

Bio

Record

Source: ESPN CricInfo

career peak

Source: ESPN CricInfo