No matter what his achievements, Clarke will never win over the public entirely. That says more about them than him

Fifteen per cent is an approval rating that would make any politician blush, but that’s how low Michael Clarke’s sank in the Ashes summer of 2010–11, when an opinion poll revealed that was the proportion of respondents who wanted Clarke to captain the Australian cricket team.

That the poll was of readers of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, whose readers are typically about as partial towards New South Wales cricketers as Mike Gatting was towards cheese sandwiches, must have made the statistic doubly difficult for Clarke, born and bred in Sydney’s working-class west, to comprehend.



So bad did things get for the 29-year vice-captain and long-time heir apparent that Ashes summer that he was even booed to the crease by the Brisbane crowd when he walked out to bat in a one-day international against England at the Gabba. Clarke, in the midst of an ill-timed, severe form slump during a horrible summer for Australian cricket, responded with a fluent, match-winning and series-clinching 54 off 74 balls. He was applauded as he walked off.

The last Australian batsman to be booed to the crease by his fellow Australians on Australian soil was Mark Waugh at the Adelaide Oval in the Ashes summer of 1998–99. The spectators booed him for a reason — it had just been revealed that, four years earlier, Waugh had accepted money from an Indian bookmaker in exchange for pitch and weather information.

Clarke had done no remotely similar thing. The day before the game, Clarke walked a group of under-nines from a Brisbane club side onto the Gabba and spent time with them. The day before that, he spent time with schoolchildren affected by the Queensland floods. Two years earlier it had been Clarke’s idea, not Cricket Australia’s, for the Australian team to visit the victims of the Victorian bushfires, according to Ricky Ponting’s autobiography.

Earlier this summer, Clarke was roundly applauded when he walked out to bat during a one-dayer against England at the MCG, having just led an unfancied, inexperienced Australian side to a glorious 5-0 Ashes whitewash.

One might be tempted, then, to believe that Clarke’s relationship with the Australian public has turned full circle.

I don’t.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Low point: Clarke walks off the Gabba after being dismissed in the first Ashes Test against England in 2010. Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

I believe Clarke has not been, and in all likelihood never will be, truly embraced by the public in the same fashion that his immediate predecessors — Ricky Ponting, Steve Waugh, Mark Taylor and Allan Border — were. That unfortunate state of affairs is in no way Clarke’s fault, but it does tell us something about the public he faithfully serves.

A few Saturday nights ago, as Australia played the world’s No 1 ranked Test side, South Africa, in Port Elizabeth in the second of a three-Test series, I found myself – for reasons too mundane to delve into here – alone in an inner northern suburb of Melbourne, sans internet, smartphone and Foxtel.

As luck would have it, the first pub I encountered was showing the match. On the outside, the pub was an old-fashioned affair, occupying the ground-floor of a three-storey Victorian building. On the inside, it was a curious, mildly dissociative entity. It was split into two rooms on either side of a horseshoe bar. The larger part was pure hipster, playing host to a large live audience listening to an all-girl string ensemble on stage. Skinny jeans and funny hats were in abundance. The smaller part was the kind of place which, for better or worse, is now close to extinct in Melbourne — where the carpets are sticky, the tables stickier still, and it seems there is always a TV, permanently tuned to Sky Racing, mounted right above your head.

It was here that I found a large, flat-screen TV showing the Test for the benefit of about five other patrons, all male, white and over 40. I ordered my pint, found myself a seat at edge of the horseshoe and tried to enjoy the Test.

The running commentary provided by the other patrons made that difficult.

It was the afternoon session of the third day and South Africa, with a 177-run first-innings lead in hand, were cruising in their second innings. Hashim Amla was compiling his 21st Test hundred, caressing the ball to all parts with the balletic grace that has become his trademark, and South Africa were on their way to a comprehensive 231 run victory that would square the series. By that late stage in the proceedings, there was nothing Clarke could have done to change the result.

The defeat was Australia’s first in six Test matches and was inflicted by the world’s No1 ranked side in its own backyard. Australia’s lethal pace battery had been nullified by the combination of a true, airport-baggage-carousel-slow Port Elizabeth pitch and fatigue that was the inevitable result of playing back-to-back Tests immediately after a five-Test home summer. Yet the sole focus of the commentary provided by my fellow Australian patrons was one man: Michael John Clarke.

As the South African camera crew, taking a momentary break from their seemingly eternal search for feminine beauty in the crowd, focused on Clarke at first slip, one patron announced proudly in a tone that brooked no dissent: “I’ve always hated Clarke.”

“Look at him,” chimed in another, “smiling away when we’re losing. What’s he got to be smiling about? We’re losing the Test.”

“He never scores runs when the team needs it”, asserted vitriolic man No3. He could not have been more wrong.

From the moment Clarke made his Test debut as a 23-year-old in Bangalore in October 2004, he has scored runs when the team needs it — in live Tests when series are on the line. Coming in at 4-149, Clarke scored 151 on debut in the first innings of the first Test in a country where Australia had not won a series in 35 years. His ton was not only match-winning but series-defining, putting Australia in a position from which they were able to secure an unassailable 2-0 lead by winning the third Test in Nagpur by 342 runs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Congratulated by Adam Gilchrist after his debut century in Bangalore, 2004. Photograph: Harish Tyagi/EPA

Clarke’s performance in his debut series was a portent of the good things to come: his performance in the live Tests (376 runs at an average of 75.2) far exceeded his performance in the dead rubbers (24 runs at an average of 12). This virtuous disparity has been no less evident in his recent record. Since the 2013 Ashes in England, in live rubbers Clarke has scored 871 runs at an average of 58.07, including four centuries, three of which were match-winning and the fourth of which would have been but for the English weather. In dead rubbers he has scored just 94 runs at an average of 15.67.

Thus, contrary to what vitriolic man No3 in the pub seemed to fervently believe, Clarke has always scored runs when the team needs it and continues to do so. Indeed, the truthful criticism that could be levelled at Clarke is that he only scores runs when the team needs it and, whether consciously or not, rests his famously degenerative back once a Test series has been decided.

Of course, I wanted to refer to the evidence as I sat there in the pub past midnight, listening to untruth after untruth being uttered about the Australian captain. But I also wanted to watch the Test and keep my skull intact.

Thus, I said nothing as a fourth vitriolic man entered the conversation with yet another blatant untruth: that “Clarke was born with a silver spoon in his mouth”. In fact, Clarke grew up in Sydney’s working-class west and dropped out of school at 16 to pursue his dream of playing Test cricket for Australia. He took a job at the Kingsgrove Sports Centre and caught the 5.30am train there every morning so that he could fit in two hours of net practice before starting work.

The final untruth uttered about Clarke on that Saturday night was perhaps the most revealing, tinged as it was with more than a hint of envy: “He thinks he’s good because he’s fucked a supermodel. So what.” Although Clarke was once engaged to Lara Bingle, whose official website describes her as “one of Australia’s best known models and media personalities”, and is now happily married to Kyly Clarke, née Boldy, a professional model, actress, presenter and interior designer, neither could seriously be described as a supermodel.

It was the late, great Ray Robinson who observed, nearly three decades ago, that Australia’s cricket captains were “the first Australians to give Australia an identity”. As such, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the relationship between Australia’s cricket captains and the society that produced them can tell us something about the latter.

From the moment Clarke slipped on a baggy green for the first time nearly a decade ago, he has consistently upheld many of the finest virtues of Australia’s cricketing history: an attacking batsman of humble origins who scores quickly when his team most needs runs and fearlessly uses his feet to the spinners; and an aggressive, creative, tactically astute and agile captain who attacks at every opportunity, often in unorthodox fashion (such as the deployment of the leg-slip that snared the vital wicket of JP Duminy on the triumphant final day of the third Test in Cape Town), and is unafraid to risk losing Test matches in order to win them.

Clarke’s only deviations from the historical ideal of an Australian cricket captain have been purely cosmetic — the tattoos, the BMW convertible, “the biggest sporting-brand sponsorship deal in Australian cricket history”, signed before he’d played a single Test, and the glamour model fiancée. Yet he has been damned for those cosmetic sins, like no Australian captain before, by a significant segment of the public.

The fact that he has been damned not for what he has done, but for what he looks like and who he is wrongly perceived to be, perhaps reflects an increasingly cosmetically-inclined nation, where it sometimes seems reality no longer aligns with self-perception. It is a nation that seems ill at ease with itself — where everyone seems to watch reality cooking shows, but hardly anyone cooks at home; where most people say they still believe in tolerance and a fair go for all, but many seem to have little objection to government policies that have allowed at least one asylum seeker in Australia’s care to be beaten to death in an off-shore detention centre.

In such an age, Michael Clarke is perhaps the captain Australia no longer deserves.