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.
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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.
