Boys in a bubble
In the world of elite Australian cricket under the leadership of Michael Clarke, sportsmanship and a love of the game were subsumed by self-regard.
As a boy, before I became a poor leg spinner, I was an average medium pacer. My tiny stature made generating bounce or serious pace almost impossible, requiring me to develop the wilier skills of swing, seam bowling and leg/off cutters.
The usefulness of variety as a bowler was already impressed upon me before I realised it was a personal necessity. Within a cricket textbook, a gift from my parents one Christmas, was an inspiring quote from England all-rounder Ian Botham that I still remember (in paraphrase) today:
“You should always be making the batsman ask himself: What will he bowl me next?” Intimidation wasn’t everything – there was also beguilement.
If my body’s limitations asked me to cultivate a more cunning bowling repertoire, the physical materials of the junior game thwarted me. For one, seam bowling – achieving abrupt deviation off the pitch to confound the batsman – was, unsurprisingly, impossible without a seam. Instead, our hard, slightly rubbery balls had only an impersonation of one, an insignificant equator of tiny plastic ridges.
Then there were the pitches. Like the majority of Australians, I played exclusively on the artificial-turf kind, which were effectively strips of concrete papered over with a very thin, very worn green carpet. Good luck finding any movement off these things, which were implacably flat unless one could precisely land the ball upon a stray gumnut.
There was swing bowling, which for me had acquired a magical aura. But though I earnestly mimicked my heroes’ lacquering of the ball with sweat and saliva, and endlessly buffed one of its sides on my pants, the sad truth was that swing was also impossible with these balls. They were both resistant to the polishing and degradation required to exploit the aerodynamics of drag – and thus move the ball in flight.
This left me with leg and off cutters, deliveries achieved by sharply running the fingers down one side of the ball upon release, thus creating a kind of spin. But to bowl these required hands and fingers at least twice as large as my own. It is, I discovered, hard to manipulate a ball that sits like a desk globe in your palm.
And so, after months of upsettingly fruitless experiments in the nets and in matches, I realised that the only achievable virtue my bowling might attain was oldfashioned accuracy – even if good line and length matters less when the ball’s arriving as slowly as a turtle through snow.
And yet: in 1991, this dogged, unsexy commitment to accuracy crowned my cricketing glory. In an unrecorded number of overs, I bowled 4/9 – and only narrowly missed a hat-trick. After two consecutive wickets, my third delivery was edged to slip – only for Simon to bloody fumble it. That Simon probably felt worse than I did was not likely an insight available to me then, but our coach tried to assuage my disappointment and incipient grudge-bearing, something that was made easier by the free Mcdonald’s Happy Meal
I was awarded as man of the match. I would later become rather protective of Simon, who was often ridiculed for his clumsiness.
And what I thought of this week, amid the great dust storm surrounding the public quarrel between Michael Clarke and his partner, Jade Yarbrough, was how our former Test captain might’ve responded if poor
Simon had dropped him on a hat-trick.
My favourite Michael Clarke story is one told by Brett Geeves in a 2016 column. Geeves retired from first-class cricket in 2011 after yielding to back injuries, but had played for Tasmania for a decade and made two appearances for the Australian one-day squad.
Geeves was a very good cricketer, but one who played on the outer periphery of the national team, and so witnessed, but was never a tenant of, the gilded bubble in which the others lived. This mix of distance and proximity is his first virtue as a cricket columnist. His second is that he never seemed embarrassed or embittered by his “failure” to break into the national squad. In retirement, these two virtues were transferred into refreshingly humorous and candid writing about the game.
In 2009, after an injury to paceman Doug Bollinger, Geeves was surprised to be called to the national one-day squad then touring South Africa. His excitement, though, was quickly deflated by his weird reception. He tells of waiting to cross a Johannesburg highway, where the only other people around were on the other side, also waiting for the green man. They were Geeves’s captain, Michael Clarke, and Clarke’s then fiancée. As they approached each other, Geeves removed his earphones to better exchange pleasantries and an introduction. “What happened next makes me glad I possess a sense of humour that thrives on socially awkward encounters, because Michael and Lara Bingle walked straight past me without any tip of the cap, no smile, zero acknowledgement,” he wrote. “I think they may have turned around when I burst out laughing, but I can’t be sure.”
Geeves had to make his own way to the stadium from the airport and was dropped half a kilometre away from it by an anxious cab driver who felt Geeves’s presence had made them a target for abduction. With his two large bags, Geeves schlepped the rest of the way, where he was met by a security guard with a machinegun who doubted his credentials.
Once inside, Geeves was met with silence and quizzical looks from the team. There was no induction – there was barely a “g’day”. When his foot was broken in his first match, he was given his orders to fly back to Australia – and that was that. No pat on the bum, just a ticket home. “[It was] a great example of how the real world and the way we communicate, mentor and harness the strengths and weaknesses of those colleagues that make up our workplace compares unfavourably to the bubble of professional cricket.”
Then there was Clarke’s feud with sports commentator Gerard Whateley in
2018. After the Sandpapergate ball-tampering scandal, Whateley argued that while Clarke had retired a few years earlier, you could draw a straight line from the team’s current culture to his leadership. “When the cultural review identified the phenomenon of the gilded bubble where elite cricketers existed in a parallel universe blessed with wealth and privilege oblivious to outside perception and influence, it should’ve posted a photo of the former captain,” Whateley said. “Where Australia became a reviled cricket team, that dates back to his time as captain and it continued on from there.”
Clarke’s response was long and indignant. “For [Whateley] to insinuate that I am responsible for the ball-tampering issue makes him nothing more than a headlinechasing coward,” Clarke said. “Perhaps if he was talented enough or courageous enough to make it onto a cricket pitch he would have a better perspective than from behind a microphone.”
Here was the narcissism of the elite athlete, which made it hard for him to see how a sports reporter might not be a failed athlete but rather someone doing what they have always wanted to do.
There was also Clarke’s invocation of “toughness”. In Clarke’s view, Whateley was ignorantly asking for the team to strip itself of its own mythologised DNA and replace it with something politically correct and doomed to mediocrity. “Australian cricket, I think, needs to stop worrying about being liked and start worrying about being respected,” Clarke said. “If you try and walk away from it, we might be the most liked team in the world, we’re not going to win shit.”
It’s funny how conveniently versatile the notion of “toughness” is. In Clarke’s mouth, it stretches elastically to cover all manner of snobbery, obnoxiousness and self-absorption. It’s the infinite alibi. But what Brett Geeves described wasn’t toughness; it was the tribalism of high school: a gang of cool kids giddy with their status and jealously patrolling the borders of their own exceptionalism. At this altitude, basic principles of collegiality don’t seem to exist, and at some point “toughness” becomes a fig leaf for arseholes.
After cricket, Clarke moved to commentary, flipping mansions and leasing out his superyacht for opulent parties. This surprised no one. For a long time, Clarke has perfectly embodied the word “flog”. Shallow, abrasive and self-regarding, he was always gifted at alienating people, including teammates, and few mourned his absence after retirement.
I never played cricket at a serious level and there’s a yawning gulf between my innocent dedication to the sport and the circus of commercialism and conceitedness at the game’s apex.
But they were wonderful days. The game encouraged guile, perseverance and creative adaptation. It exposed me to the thrill of competition and self-improvement. There were obvious health and social benefits, and lessons in forgiveness – of myself and others. Cricket was a passionate pursuit and it filled my inner life as it filled so many of my social hours.
Does Michael Clarke remember those days? The days before he was paid the average man’s salary for simply wearing a deluxe watch? The days when he was more in love with the game than he was with his own image? Because for me, the magic of the game still resides in those distant suburban nets – and the memory of my coach asking me to go easy on Simon.