Michael Clarke has a hall of fame record for Australia. Exclusion from the company of other greats of the game underlines his complicated legacy.
Ian Redpath’s induction this week, alongside Margaret Jennings, was in recognition of not only one of the nation’s flintiest Test match openers but also an admired team man and contributor to the game in retirement.
Michael Clarke celebrates his triple century at the SCG in 2012.Credit:Getty Images
In addition to allowing for one of the more entertaining induction speeches of recent times, the decision to add Redpath to a select group of the cream of Australian cricket had another less intentional effect – highlighting the absence of Clarke.
In 2020, Clarke reached five years since his international retirement at the end of the 2015 Ashes series, making him eligible for inclusion.
Based purely on his numbers with the bat, and his win/loss record as a captain at home in particular, Clarke would have been a candidate for immediate elevation to the group.
Moreover, in a career that took place entirely after the Allan Border Medal was first awarded in 2000, Clarke’s trio of medals and quartet of Shane Warne Test player of the year trophies make him comfortably the most decorated player of his generation.
But if there is hesitance to induct Clarke, it comes from a combination of reservations about some elements of his story, and also a wider reckoning with an era of Australian cricket that elevated the value of winning while achieving less than the era before it.
Leaving high school in Year 11 to become a professional cricketer, after growing up with parents who owned an indoor cricket centre, Clarke’s focus on becoming the best he could possibly be was never in doubt.
But there was a certain narrowness to him and others who followed in the men’s game, increasingly flushed as it became with money and commercial opportunity. As an example, take Clarke’s comments a year ago complaining about the Allan Border Medal itself.
“If I was given the option, even winning the Allan Border Medal, I wouldn’t have went (sic),” Clarke said on his radio show last year. “Because it’s never the end of season for us. With cricket, it’s a TV program, so everything on there is done for television.
“And then you’ve got media around the whole time, so you can’t unwind and drink because there will be a photo or a video and someone being pissed or under the weather, and then you’ve got to read about that the next day.”
In 2020, when made a Cricket NSW life member, Clarke declined to attend the state association’s AGM to accept the honour, instead doing so via Zoom.
Clarke’s era, where his ascension to the captaincy coincided with the Don Argus-led review of Australian team performance, pushed the national team to achieve the goals of being No.1 in the world in all formats at once, an aspiration that the late Rod Marsh was later to say created the preconditions for the 2018 Newlands scandal.
But for Clarke and numerous other players of distinction from the period – Shane Watson, Brad Haddin, Mitchell Johnson and Ryan Harris are all worthy of hall of fame consideration – there is the unmistakable sense that more might have been accomplished with better underpinnings than simply the pressure to win.
Certainly the current side, led by captain Pat Cummins and a cadre of senior players who grew up under Clarke, has a much more rounded view of the factors that contribute to success. A happier, more balanced group of cricketers can enjoy wins at home and away as a by-product of being well-prepared, thoughtful and considerate of others.
The moment of victory: Australia outlast Pakistan in Lahore last year.Credit:AP
In that sense, they are not too far removed from the group of which Redpath was an integral figure, even as he missed numerous overseas tours in the latter part of his 66-Test match stint to spend time with his family. Winning, important though it was, arrived as a side effect of playing well and for each other.
What is left, years and decades later, is not merely the winning team photos and trophies but the shared memories of doing it all together. Both the players and the Australian cricket public remember that feeling much more easily than statistics.
Clarke’s era, meanwhile, was punctuated by a few shining moments. There was the 2013-14 Ashes summer, a dramatic victory in South Africa a few weeks later, and the lifting of the 2015 50-over World Cup on home soil.
But the overseas record of his team was poor, soundly beaten twice in England and once in India, also being thrashed by Pakistan in the UAE. Victories away from home tend to be characterised by togetherness and shared purpose, a thread running through the road triumphs of teams led by Ian Chappell, Border, Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting and, last year in Pakistan, Pat Cummins.
At the same time, the current group know intrinsically that their legacy will be shaped not by individual records, of which they already have plenty of the handsome variety, but by shared triumphs away from home in India and England this year.
Without team garlands, it is harder to place what exactly those singular records actually mean to Australian cricket. Clarke’s exclusion thus far from the hall of fame serves as a signal reminder of that fact.
