My Story

by Michael Clarke

  I also loved Steve Waugh’s ability to fight hardest when his team needed him most. He would stamp his authority on matches by trying to score more than 300 runs a day and then unleashing Brett Lee bowling 150 km/h. It was all action in those teams Steve led.

  By far the biggest influences on my captaincy ideas were Ricky Ponting and Shane Warne, in completely different ways.

  Punter’s trademark was how he led by example with the bat. He was always the best batsman in any team he captained. He performed day in, day out at training and in games – he really was the ultimate professional. When you played with him, he inspired you to be better. You wanted to put on a big partnership with him, and you wanted to impress him. My cricket was lifted merely by being in Ricky’s team, and I don’t think you can say more of a captain than that.

  There’s a lot that comes with captaincy besides tactics on the field. Warney was the best tactician who never captained Australia. I think, having played under him at Hampshire and later watched him with the Rajasthan Royals, that he would have been an unbelievably good Test captain. He was a peerless reader of the game on the field. Off the field, he built friendships with individual players like no one else I’ve ever seen. He could man-manage players and do all the parts of the job successfully.

  When he became a commentator and I was captain, I would ask him nightly what he’d seen. We’ve always had an honest relationship, so he would say, ‘You should have used Mitchell Johnson a bit more’, or ‘I thought you brought Lyono on a bit late’. He saw things nobody else could see, and put it together for me with insight and candour.

  Warney’s style of captaincy was to take wickets, score runs, move the game forward. I grew up watching all sports and loving the contest, with the anticipation that somebody would win and somebody lose. The fear of losing was never in my system because of that. Warney, at the highest level, had similar thoughts. He wanted to see the game always progressing towards a result.

  From my Australian debut until my retirement, the greatest gift he gave me was letting me learn from his experiences. There’s no better way to learn than to sit side by side with an Australian cricketing legend who is such a good mentor. I would never have been the player and captain I was without Shane Warne’s help. I see him and my Dad as my two biggest cricket influences.

  Unlike Punter, who was my Australian captain for seven years, Warney never held that position, but what he showed was how a senior player could contribute ideas and creative leadership, whether he had the (c) beside his name or not.

  And this was the nub of the matter when it came to me. I would probably have been better, between 2008 and 2011, as a senior player tossing ideas Ricky’s way than I was as the vice-captain.

  By 2008, four years after my Test debut, I was asking New South Wales if I could be captain to get some experience, but because I wasn’t playing enough games for them, they said they wanted to stick with the one captain – which I certainly understood. But I was feeling pressure externally to gain captaincy experience. Everyone seemed to be saying I was the heir apparent to the Australian captaincy. I came onto the Test scene and scored a century on debut in India, in a series where we won in that country for the first time since 1969. Then I came home and scored another hundred in my first Test match. It was a charmed run. After I came back from being dropped, I felt that there was a growing expectation from outside that I would be the next captain. I was much younger than the generation of leaders in the team, seven years younger than Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist and Mike Hussey, and it seemed that I would fit the timetable. I didn’t ask for that designation, but once it was placed upon me, I felt that I had to deal with it.

  The best Australian batsman is almost always the captain – Greg Chappell, Allan Border, Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting, and so on – and it seemed that I was marked out at an age when I wasn’t even aware of it. I was trying to help us win games and hold onto my place in the team, never mind becoming the best batsman. I wasn’t a natural captain as a young man. What Ricky said was right: I didn’t have that instinctive Mark Taylor ability to forget about my own performances and put the team’s needs first. I did get preoccupied with my own performances and go into my shell when I wasn’t doing well. When I was dropped, I couldn’t just put it to one side and party with the boys in Hobart. When my family and personal life were weighing on me, I couldn’t just put them into the too-hard basket.

  Nor was I the standard type of character for the Australian cricket captaincy. I was a western suburbs boy with my own style. From a young age, I was too keen on having a good time to be the textbook head-prefect type. As a kid, I never wanted to be seen as a goody-goody and, as my parents and teachers can tell you, I was often an argumentative little pest. There were lots and lots of reasons why I shouldn’t have been captain, but from 2006, when I got back into the team after being dropped, it seemed that I was being ‘groomed’.

  When I became aware of the plans being shaped for me from higher up, I was humbled. But it was the worst thing for me to be anointed as the heir apparent. Somehow, the perception became that I was telling the world I was going to be the next captain, and that I had sought it out. The truth was the opposite. Whenever anyone asked me about it, I tried to talk it down. Would I like to captain Australia? Of course. It would be an honour. But it had never been a goal.

  I could honestly and literally deny that the captaincy would be ‘a dream come true’. It wasn’t my dream at all. But once you read it enough in the papers and see it in the news, everyone believes it and there’s a sneaky part of you that begins to adapt to it. Your mind starts a transition. I began to think, If this is going to happen, I have to perform well and learn as much as I can. I was never seeking the job, but I began adjusting to the reality that was developing around me.

  As I had never sought the vice-captaincy, when I took over the job from Gilly in 2008, I was walking on eggshells. Gilly was a hard act to follow, because he was the ideal vice-captain to Ricky. He formed a valuable bridge between Ricky and the boys, taking the load off the skipper’s shoulders and providing counsel to the younger players. Brad Haddin, late in my captaincy career, was a perfect deputy for the same reasons.

  I entered the vice-captaincy torn between two opposite forces. One was that I wanted to help Punter by offering suggestions and coming up with ways to win games. The other was that I was self-conscious about people thinking I was pushing myself forward, so I would go out of my way to not look like the heir apparent. Often, when I thought I had a good idea, I would bite my lip. But I’ve always been a bad actor and, as Punter wrote in his book, sometimes when I was trying to say nothing, my feelings were written all over my face.

  When I disagreed with things Ricky was doing, I got in trouble for saying nothing. It wasn’t that he wasn’t trying to win the game or help us have success, but my ideas were different from his, on and off the field. If I thought we could have got a key batsman out, declared at a different time, scored more runs, or played a different style, I was too scared to say what I thought, because I didn’t want to offend Ricky or undermine the captain’s authority, but teammates and support staff could see straight through me. I couldn’t mask it. They knew I was pissed off with Ricky’s decisions or didn’t agree with something that was happening, even if I was acting – very unconvincingly – as if I was backing his decision.

  There were also times when I couldn’t understand why Ricky was going along with decisions that he disagreed with. He delegated a great deal to others, but then griped about it later. It might be something like the manager, Steve Bernard, announcing that the team bus would be leaving the hotel the next morning at 6 am, when play wasn’t starting until 11. Ricky would be grumbling with the rest of the boys about going so early. My view was, ‘If you’re the captain, you should be stepping in and we should leave when you want us to leave. Isn’t that what the captain does?’

  Another example that sticks out clearly in my memory is when a consultant, Martin West, was brou
ght in to help us with our team culture. Martin is a champion guy I grew to respect. He was the third consultant to be asked in to present to the team in two years. He asked us to write our ‘Values’ on a whiteboard and then sign the piece of paper saying we would live up to these values.

  Martin came on the 2008 tour to India with us. We were sitting in a room going through the ‘values’ discussion. A lot of the guys were thinking, What are we doing here? We don’t need this shit. Yep, yep, yep – can we get out of here now? Few guys had any interest in it. Because of my age, I was close to those restless younger players and shared their thoughts. Ricky and Tim Nielsen said the group needed a values statement, but the guys weren’t buying in. I was so frustrated, thinking, How much more shit are we going to talk before someone has the balls to come out and be honest?

  So I stood up and said to Martin, ‘You’re the third guy who’s come in to do this with us. You can write whatever you want on the board. But when it’s day five, we’re playing here in India, our arses are hanging out, it’s 40 degrees, we’ve got Delhi belly, and we’re getting flogged, we’re not going to be thinking, “We have to uphold some values we’ve written down on a piece of paper”.’

  I thought we were wasting everyone’s time – again. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with what Martin was saying, but it was the wrong time and place, the boys weren’t receptive, and we were being told to write down a list of words that had no meaning there and then. ‘If we win, we win, that’s good,’ I said, ‘but if we lose, everyone’s going to go back to looking out for himself, they’re not going to be thinking about “team values”.’

  (I have to add that Martin West would become one of my closest confidants and was always someone I could pick up the phone and call and discuss anything with, particularly in the back half of my career. He gave me perspective: urged me to see things the way others saw them. And that relationship had a firm foundation because it had begun with me being so honest. When we came back to Australia after that 2008 tour, he said he’d rather me be upfront like that because if you sit there silently, you contribute nothing.)

  Back in 2008, we were, in my view, holding some meetings for the sake of holding a meeting. We had lost a lot of senior players, and the younger guys weren’t up for that kind of thing. Nobody else had the balls to say it. But that was the explosion for me. I didn’t want to disrespect Punter, but this was bullshit.

  Anyway, my objections were noted and we carried on. I have no doubt that this is one of the things Punter was writing about in his book. And the difficult truth is, he was right. A vice-captain has to back the leader; there’s no room for anything else. He might sit on the fence, but he can’t disagree and, if he does, he should neither voice those opinions nor bite his tongue on them. Vice-captaincy just wasn’t a role I was cut out for.

  I went to Ricky a number of times and told him, behind closed doors, that I disagreed with something, but by then that wasn’t the right approach either. Through those years, we had some bad results – losing heavily in India, losing to South Africa and England at home, losing to England away, getting knocked out of the World Cup in the quarter-finals – and lost a raft of senior players to retirement. Ricky didn’t need a Warne-style deputy, who was throwing up alternative ideas all the time. He needed someone to say, ‘Yes, sir, you’re right, sir.’ That wasn’t me, and I couldn’t adapt.

  It would have been better if I hadn’t been made vice-captain. If the selectors thought I might be the right guy to captain Australia in the future, they might have been well advised to keep Gilly or someone like him as vice-captain and let me learn, as a senior player, from Ricky.

  What seemed to aggravate the tension between public expectation and my private ambivalence was when Ricky missed matches and I became captain. I couldn’t help myself – of course I wanted to do a good job and enjoy it on those one-off occasions, so I ran the tactics and the style of play my way. But then, when people said positive things about my captaincy, I felt terrible, because I thought Ricky would be offended. I hated anyone saying I was tactically better than Ricky, because to him it would look like I was angling to take his place. It was not healthy for our relationship.

  I had to work hard, during the last year or so of his captaincy, to reassure him. He was coming under increasing pressure as our results went up and down, and whenever a commentator praised my captaincy as a stand-in, I would go to Ricky and tell him I had nothing to do with it and didn’t want that praise.

  The trickiest times were when it was Warney, who was now working as a TV commentator and newspaper columnist, saying positive things about me. Ricky knew how close I was to Warney, and the pair of them had also had their differences over tactics while Warney was still playing. Each time Warney said or wrote something praising my stand-in captaincy, I had to contact Ricky and say, ‘I can’t control what Warney says, and I haven’t been putting my case to him.’ I hoped Ricky would believe me, but looking back, I’m not sure if he did.

  Whether or not I had the ambition to be captain, I didn’t enjoy being vice-captain. If I had said to Ricky, ‘I don’t care if I never captain Australia’, would he have believed me? I don’t know, but it was the truth. I never saw the captaincy as something that would make me a more successful player or person. I was doing fine. But the world was telling me that I was the next captain. It was all being set up around me. When it becomes a public designation, the more I was put up there, the more I believed it was going to happen.

  I don’t think I needed the vice-captaincy to be prepared as the next Australian captain, but I guess I only realised this after I had it. I accepted that the vice-captaincy was part of the transition to being captain, so okay, I plugged away. I think it ate away at my friendship with Ricky who, I always felt, I liked a lot more than he liked me.

  But the most painful toll of the vice-captaincy was upon my closest friendship in the team.

  8

  SYMMO

  It’s 2003 and I’m a brand-new member of the Australian one-day cricket team. It’s obvious to all and sundry that I am not your typical Aussie man. I only ever open a can of Victoria Bitter to spray it on a teammate during a celebration – I can’t stand the taste of beer. I don’t have a ute or a cattle dog. I experiment with different hairstyles and I have an earring.

  But opposites attract, and somehow Andrew Symonds – who loves beer or Bundy, drives a ute, goes fishing and shooting in his spare time, and is the archetypal Queenslander – and I find our way to each other. We share a sense of humour and, after play, are like heat-seeking missiles looking for fun.

  Symmo, six years older than me, is the next in my succession of ‘big brothers’. One of the things I absolutely loved when I first came into the Australian team was that all of a sudden I had about a dozen new big brothers. They were all good to me, Warney first and foremost. When Warney retires in 2007, my closest big brother in the team is Symmo.

  On and off the field, Symmo protects me. He has played a lot of international cricket by the time I break into the Australian team. He is an electrifying cricketer in all formats of the game – one of the best fielders I’ve seen, an explosive batsman when most players are still risk-averse, and a more than handy spin and medium-pace bowler (who got me out nicking for a golden duck in my first Shield match at the Gabba). He has been a fixture in the one-day international team from the time he scored 143 against Pakistan in the 2003 World Cup.

  Over the course of several overseas tours, we bond as mates. He is always very funny, sometimes unintentionally – such as when he buys a ticket in a lottery and, hearing that the winner will be drawn on the 31st of the month, says sternly to the ticket seller, ‘I will be contacting you on the 32nd’. Sometimes his humour is intentional, such as during the 2007 World Cup when Shane Watson lights an incense candle to mask a nasty smell in the dressing room, and Symmo says deadpan to team manager Steve Bernard, ‘If it’s come to this, I don’t want to play for Australia anymore.’

  It amuses both
of us to surprise people by our closeness, the country boy and the city slicker. But we’re both very close to our families and talk about them a lot, and we play cricket with the same go-forward spirit. At training, we’re always competing against each other to go harder.

  For Symmo, by his own admission, the problem is knowing when the fun has to stop. In England and Wales for the one-day series leading up to the 2005 Ashes, we are preparing for a match against Bangladesh in Cardiff. The night before, it’s Shane Watson’s 24th birthday. I’m in bed early, but Symmo comes knocking at my door.

  ‘Come on, mate, what are you doing? We’re going out! It’s Saturday night!’

  He throws open my curtains, and the streets outside are packed. I put my jeans and shirt on and go with him, joining a group of teammates at a bar.

  At about midnight, I say to Symmo, ‘I’m cooked, mate, I’m going back to the hotel. Are you coming?’

  Symmo looks at me. ‘Nah, mate, I’m going to stay.’

  After trying about five times, I can’t get him out, so I go back to the hotel on my own. Others who are staying on with Symmo, such as Brad Haddin, Brett Lee and Watto, are not in tomorrow’s team.

  Next morning, I’m on the bus with everyone else, waiting to leave for Sophia Gardens. Someone says, ‘Where’s Symmo?’

  Nobody knows. I try his phone. It rings out. Brett Lee, Shane Watson and Brad Haddin get on the bus.

  ‘What happened to Symmo?’ I ask quietly.

  ‘Oh, we left him.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘About 4.30.’

  I rush back into the hotel and grab a key from reception. In his room, I find Symmo passed out on his bed, still in his going-out clothes.

  ‘Mate! Symmo, wake up!’

  He just grunts. I open the mini-bar, grab two bottles of water and pour them over him, slapping and pinching him and eventually getting him awake. He showers and climbs into his gear.