The inevitable grumblers grumbling about Michael Clarke’s induction to the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame are looking at the wrong hall and the wrong type of fame. Perhaps also watching the wrong videos, searching for the wrong gossip and listening to the wrong sound bites. If there’s any criticism that can justifiably be made of Clarke’s induction, announced on Thursday, it’s that it is overdue. It’s certainly deserved.
There is not a character test for the Hall of Fame, and what if there were? Buying an expensive car, being disliked by some teammates and having it out with Karl Stefanovic on a grassy knoll are not (yet) federal crimes. And if being everyone’s cup of tea were among the criteria, you can start clearing out the Hall of Fame, starting with its earliest member Jack Blackham. Cricket has never been a game of absolutes.
How will Clarke’s cricket legacy be valued? A Hall of Fame is one prism through which to view it. That is, after all, why they exist. Clarke’s career fell in a kind of golden age gap. It overlapped with the late careers of Hall of Famers Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Adam Gilchrist, Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer, but they were half a generation ahead of Clarke. Half a generation behind will be the Hall of Famers Steve Smith, David Warner, Nathan Lyon, Patrick Cummins and more.
Among Clarke’s direct contemporaries, who were Australia’s best? Mike Hussey, Shane Watson, Brad Haddin, Mitchell Johnson and more were all fine Test cricketers, but Clarke was indisputably the foremost Australian cricketer of that between-two-dynasties time.
His record is too quickly forgotten in an era of confected familiarity and “Yeah but I just don’t like the guy”. Too easily remembered are the kinks and foibles of public relations. Too easily forgotten is the straight-out joy Clarke brought to an ageing team in the first phase of his career. He scored his maiden Test century on debut, in Bangalore in 2004, in Australia’s first win of a series that remains their only victory on Indian soil since 1969.
Michael Clarke during his century against India in 2004.Credit: Reuters
By the time the teams reached Mumbai for the fourth Test match Australia had a 2-0 series lead. The rubber was dead, but the game is best remembered for Clarke’s six wickets for nine runs. The first of his 31 Test wickets, tweaked out by his left arm that day, was Rahul Dravid.
Three years later, Clarke’s golden arm pulled off another freak win in Sydney, but again it was overshadowed, this time by a trade of insults and a near-rupture between India and Australia.
It is Clarke’s decade of supreme international batting that earns him his place in the hall, and this too, in the fog of unrelated personality clashes, is easily overlooked and somehow underrated. The arithmetic adds up to a monument: 115 Test matches, 8643 runs at 49.10; 245 one-day internationals, 7981 runs at 44.58; 188 first-class matches, 13,826 runs at 47.02.
Among the highlights were that Bangalore Test century and arguably Clarke’s masterpiece, his 151 on a Newlands greentop against Dale Steyn, Vernon Philander and Morne Morkel in 2011.
The next highest score from either team in the first two days of that match was Shaun Marsh’s 44. Together, the South African first innings and the Australian second innings did not add up to Clarke’s 151.
There were a couple of summers between 2011 and 2013, when Clarke took over the Australian captaincy from Ponting, in which he was compared to Don Bradman. Against New Zealand, India and South Africa, he made scores of 139, 329 not out, 210, 259 not out and 230.
Only Bradman ever maintained a peak like that, and while it’s easy to think Clarke went into a decline after that period, he still made another seven Test centuries, highlighted by his unbeaten 161 in Cape Town with a fractured shoulder and a bung back, in another Australian win. He spent the entire second half of his Test career talking his back into cooperating, and very often it didn’t.
There is a well-defined sub-Bradman echelon of Australian batting, a little club of Victor Trumper through Greg Chappell and Allan Border to Steve Waugh, Ponting and Smith. By any measure, Clarke belongs in that club.
But cricket-time has accelerated; there is less ruminating on these achievements and more impressionistic flashes. Lost in this swirl are the imagination, brio and cricket IQ Clarke brought to on-field tactics as Australian captain. Managing a team in a difficult period, Clarke was able to steer Australia to recover the Ashes (five-nil in 2013-14) and beat South Africa in South Africa a few months later.
He led Australia to a one-day World Cup win at home in 2015 and was a member of the one-day unbeatables in 2007.
His leadership after Phillip Hughes’s death in 2014 was singular, with a personal openness and a raw grief that would have been beyond most Australian captains. In those weeks, his role transcended cricket in a way that is often attributed to the office of Australian men’s Test captain but seldom – thankfully – put to the test.
Clarke led Australian cricket in a time of cultural transition, and maybe that’s another reason his record with the bat got lost in the mix. He made his Test debut six months after the first-ever Twenty20 international. By the time he retired, the Indian Premier League had become a behemoth steamrolling the cricket world. Without T20 in his blood, Clarke’s batting – and his worsening back – wasn’t fully adaptive, and he couldn’t manage the late-career reinvention that Mike Hussey, for example, achieved. This was one of those cricket paradoxes. Mr Cricket, the old-fashioned cricket obsessive, turned himself into a T20 superstar while Pup, who seemed created for showbiz, never quite made the leap.
Michael Clarke embraces a team-mate at Phillip Hughes’ funeral.Credit: AP
Steering away from the personal is what the Cricket Hall of Fame is there for. As a declaration of interest, I know Michael Clarke as well as a journalist can know anyone from collaborating in the literary trade across two or three years of their life, and I have only good things to say about him and his family.
Others have their views, sometimes based on personal encounters, sometimes based on hot air. The beauty of a Hall of Fame induction – and I’m sure the ‘selectors’ share this view – is that it’s about sport. The oddity in this particular induction is that someone with such a towering record is also getting a kind of reputation rehab.
