My Story

by Michael Clarke

  The other major challenge to Test cricket that comes from Twenty20 is where players choose the T20 franchise domestic leagues over representing their country.

  Playing for your country should be the driving ambition for every cricketer, but sometimes the financial disparity places an undue strain. For Australians, leaving aside the intrinsic benefits of wearing the baggy green or the yellow limited-overs cap, it’s easier to prioritise playing for your country, because you are paid well. A top-ten player in Australia will earn fantastic money, and you’re representing your country, doing what you dreamed of as a kid. So, for those top Australian players, to turn down an IPL contract is not a big sacrifice.

  On the other hand, when Chris Gayle was the highest-paid West Indian player, he was receiving $US100,000 for 12 months. Jamaica, his country, and the other West Indian islands are not necessarily the cheapest places in the world to live. So he certainly wasn’t growing rich representing the West Indies. On the other hand, an IPL franchise offers him a $US1.5 million contract to play for six weeks. Adding in his contracts with other T20 leagues, he can make $US2.5 to $US3 million a year – up to 30 times as much as his income with the West Indies. It would be easy for someone like me to say you’ve got to put your country first, but guys from other countries . . . well, I can understand why they make these choices. The financial difference between playing Twenty20 and playing for their country is too great.

  I know it’s scary the way franchise cricket is affecting Tests, but we’ve got to respect and understand the reasons why. I would like the international cricket community to pool its resources to try and do whatever it can to help players to prioritise playing for their country. I don’t believe international T20 cricket has a great future; it seems that the strength of the format is in domestic franchise tournaments. A place in the schedule can be carved out for the main domestic competitions such as the IPL, but otherwise the players should be given no excuse to decide against playing for their countries.

  If that means evening payments out across the countries, I say go for it. When Australia played the West Indies in the 2015–16 summer before disappointing crowds, it left an empty feeling to know that there was such a difference between what the two sets of players were earning. When you’re playing on the MCG and generating great income, it’s both teams who are making the contest and the entertainment, and both teams should get an even distribution of income.

  The landscape is changing rapidly, and I can’t imagine the new challenges that will arise over the next five to ten years. Is the international game strong enough to sustain all three formats? We’ll find that out sooner than we might think.

  It was disappointing when, during the 2015 ICC World Cup, it was announced that the number of teams playing in the 2019 version would be reduced. I’m for more, not fewer, countries playing cricket. I want to see Afghanistan, Ireland, the United Arab Emirates, the USA, Hong Kong, China, and every other ‘minnow’ country given the opportunity to improve their standards by playing against better teams. Why kick them out of the World Cup because their inclusion extends the tournament by two weeks? Those two weeks in 2015 meant that Ireland, the UAE, Afghanistan and Scotland could learn much more about the game and get better.

  It’s too early to widen the catchment for full Test status, as the five-day game exposes differences in quality too much. Heavy defeats to Test nations could be demoralising. On the other hand, the shorter formats – 50-over cricket and particularly Twenty20 – have a natural tendency to close the gap and open the possibility for upset results. My view is that children in every country in the world should be able to dream of playing international cricket against the best teams in the world. Let them play! Grow the game. Get more boys and girls playing in any country, any format. Don’t press PAUSE on the game of cricket.

  A lot of money has been spent marketing the T20 format. Now, I think the emphasis has to go back onto Test cricket. In tennis, Wimbledon is still a very successful tournament despite its ‘anachronistic’ nature, being played on grass. For most players it’s still the pinnacle of a career to win Wimbledon. All the traditions around it are still attached. Test cricket can be our sport’s Wimbledon, if it’s done the right way.

  Where the quality of Test cricket needs to be preserved is in the conditions that are presented for play. Wickets have become flatter. Over the course of my career, the ball has generally moved off the pitch less and less.

  One outcome is that cricket is not seeing bowlers of the same standard as when I started. In those years, you had Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh, Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, Shane Bond, Shoaib Akhtar, Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie and Brett Lee on the international scene. Among spinners, there was Shane Warne, Muttiah Muralitharan, Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble leading the way. I don’t know why bowling has declined, but pitches and the reduced sizes of grounds, with boundaries roped well in from the fence, have done the bowlers no favours.

  Coinciding with this change has been the elevation of batting skills due to Twenty20 and the bats we use now. T20 cricket has helped batting evolve. If the wicket is flat, guys hit it 360 degrees, and the bats are big enough that even if they mistime it, they can get it over the fielders’ heads and often over the boundary rope. Bats don’t weigh any more than they used to, and I still believe the middle of the bat is exactly as sweet as Mark Taylor’s or Allan Border’s. But it’s the size of the middle of the bat that has grown. Like tennis racquets, shots that used to be mishits are now flying off the bat because the sweet spot is so much bigger. Batters are practising their big-hitting, so bowlers are immediately at a disadvantage, which is aggravated by very flat pitches, white balls that only swing for the first two overs, and roped-in boundaries.

  The result is a distortion of averages. As I write, Adam Voges has a higher Test batting average than anyone since Bradman. I fought my arse off to get Adam into the Australian team. But is he a better player than Sachin Tendulkar or Brian Lara? Nobody would say that. Mark Waugh averaged 41 in Test cricket, and he’s one of the best players I’ve seen. He faced tougher bowlers in conditions that allowed a fairer contest between bat and ball. Ian Chappell, David Boon and Mark Taylor averaged in the low 40s. They were, in my opinion, much better players than subsequent batsmen who are averaging higher these days.

  In one-day cricket, when I started as a lower-middle-order batsman, the ball was reverse-swinging when I came in. You could easily lose five wickets in the last 20 overs of an innings due to the reverse swing of the ageing ball. That swing disappeared when the authorities changed the rules to allow in two new balls. I felt that some adjustment should have been made to statistics at that point. Dean Jones and Michael Bevan, superstars of one-day cricket, had strike rates of less than 80. They were better players than guys who now have strike rates of more than 120. But the game went through a revolution, and bowlers were the victims.

  Sensing they were on top, batsmen improved their mental approach. Huge record-breaking partnerships are regularly seen now, as batsmen keep their feet on bowlers’ throats. Batsmen prepare their bodies better, and their mindset has consequently changed. Before I played, certain players would see their role in their team as batting to survive: just hold up an end for the others. During my international career, batting has been about scoring runs. That’s the only reason to bat. Your number one concern is scoring runs. Flat pitches have made that easier. If you get in on a flat track, you go as large as you can, because it won’t always be this good. There’s a real concentration on maximising the potential of opportunities when they do arise. But it hasn’t necessarily led to better cricket or even better batting. People might like seeing big scores, but they also like seeing the bowlers have a chance. The balance has to be redressed, or else cricket will become, more than it is already, a batsman’s game.

  There are many ways of improving cricket as a spectacle, and the first day–night Test match, in Adelaide in 2015 between Australia and New Zealand, offered
us a glimpse of the future. I am in favour of anything that increases the appeal of and the audiences for Test cricket. The most important factor that I could see in that match was the evening-out of the contest between bat and ball, because more grass was left on the traditionally batsman-friendly Adelaide Oval pitch. It seems to me that more people were going to watch the day–night Test match because of the timing: they could do it after work or school. Any innovation that brings more people to the game, I’m all in favour of it. If that means playing more day–night Test cricket, that is good.

  Another issue that kept bubbling up during my playing career was corruption in international cricket. Gambling in sport is a big problem, and I don’t think there is any middle ground. I believe if a player gets caught fixing a result in any way, he should be banned for life. There is no room for it. I was never approached by bookmakers or anyone involved in illegal betting during my career and never knew of any Test match that was being fixed.

  There was talk of the 2009 Sydney Test match with Pakistan being the subject of match-fixing, but while I was playing it, I had no idea. Looking back, some of the things that happened there don’t look fantastic, but I had no sense of it at the time. In the game before that, at Hobart, Punter was dropped on the boundary by Mohammad Amir before he had scored. To be honest, I have seen much easier catches dropped by much better fieldsmen: take Herschelle Gibbs dropping Steve Waugh in the 1999 World Cup. Cricket is too hard a game for good players to play well for me ever to think about people playing less than their best. Maybe I was naive. Because I know how easy it is to drop a catch, and how hard it is to play cricket, my naivety might have blinded me. But to say I never saw any corruption doesn’t change my stance on what should happen if it is uncovered: life bans, no excuses.

  It’s been widely documented that the ‘Big Three’ of India, England and Australia have seized control of cricket’s revenues and the power over scheduling in recent years. When it comes to knowing whether that’s a good thing for cricket or not, it’s too soon for me to say. I prefer to judge it by results. Is the cricket world expanding? Is the game attracting larger audiences to all three formats? Are more children taking cricket up? Is corruption being cleaned up? Is governance improving? Is the standard of pitches and grounds around the world allowing higher quality, more attractive cricket? These are the outcomes I would like to see, so that the game I love is in a better state in the future than when I started.

  I am not involved in world cricket politics, so it’s hard for me to speak with inside knowledge about the factors determining the game’s future at that level. Locally, however, I am doing everything I can. In September 2014, I opened the Michael Clarke Cricket Academy to help youngsters achieve their dreams as I had done. Ever since Mum and Dad had their indoor centre, I wanted to provide a facility to give something back to boys and girls, in return for what I had been given. Initially, Kyly and I bought a property in Berrima, in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, with a permanent cricket facility in mind. While that project was going through the local government approval processes, the opportunity arose to set the academy up at Scots College in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The school had first-class facilities and classrooms already set up, a modern gym, ice baths, a very sophisticated infrastructure that we decided to lease. In September, October and January we do five-day live-in camps for kids aged 12 to 18, selected on their abilities from all around Australia and the world, including India, China, Singapore, Dubai and Nepal. On Sunday the young cricketers arrive, then from Monday to Thursday they do skills and fitness training, learn about recovery, stretching and mobility, and have night-time educational sessions on nutrition, media training, public speaking, social media, everything that makes up the life of a professional cricketer. We take them on a tour of the Sydney Cricket Ground, which has their eyes boggling. It’s certainly not just about batting, bowling and fielding. We do a segment on bullying, for them to realise the importance of the way they act around their peers. Their days run from 6 am to 8.30 pm and then, on the Friday, they have a match. We also do single-day clinics at junior clubs around Australia.

  It’s something I’m really proud of. Our point of difference is that I am fully involved every day; it’s not just something I lend my name to. My goal is to give them the benefit of my experiences. They have my dad and my assistant Sasha Armstrong overseeing it all, with head coach Ben Sawyer leading a group of coaches who have all helped me in some way through my career.

  I give away one scholarship to each camp myself, and my watch sponsor Hublot does the same. Spartan, Rebel and ASICS all supply gear. When the kids first arrive, I tell them that my goal isn’t for them to be playing for their country but to get the best out of themselves every day. That said, we’ve had a 16-year-old graduate, Jason Sangha, who got a state contract, and one young woman, Lauren Cheatle, in the Australian team. What I love most, however, is when a parent rings and says their child has come out of the academy a completely changed person, more confident and caring about the people around them.

  14

  DRIVING THE BUS

  It’s early 2011, and I am sitting at the Sydney Cricket Ground with a group of men conducting the Australian Team Performance Review, known as the Argus Review after the retired banker Don Argus, who is facing me across the table. He is a straight-talking, trustworthy gentleman with greying hair. More familiar faces are with him: former captains Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh, James Sutherland, and James’s predecessor as chief executive of Cricket Australia, Malcolm Speed. They are looking at how to fix our team.

  As the review has been brought on by our 3–1 defeat in the Ashes series at home, I could give them an easy answer: I ought to score more runs. I had a terrible summer with the bat, and take full responsibility for that.

  But they’ve moved on. Their questions make my heart thump.

  ‘If you become captain of Australia, would you want Ricky Ponting in the team?’

  It almost sounds like a trick question. I don’t want to presume anything. Ricky is still our captain.

  ‘I’m very much for that, if it happened,’ I say. ‘He offers the group so much more than his performance on the field. The bigger picture is the influence he’d have on the players, which we will need.’

  I take a deep breath, wondering if I have negotiated the question the right way. Why are they asking me? Has Ricky already stood down? Then they fire in another bumper: ‘What do you think about the captain being a selector?’

  Whoa, these are big questions for a guy who only wants to score more runs and help his team get back on the winners’ list. But I don’t see any way out. I can’t not answer.

  ‘It’s all about accountability. The way I’ve been brought up to play cricket, the captain has always taken accountability for success and defeat. If I was captain and I had played a big part in picking the players at the selection table, I would be able to stand up when we lost and say, “It’s my fault, I stuffed up. We picked the wrong players.” I’d be happy to put my hand up and take responsibility for that.’

  There is not much response from the other side of the table. I wonder if I’ve gone too far. Ricky often grumbles about not having enough influence on selections, and I sympathise with him. If you’re wearing the results, you should have some say in the make-up of the team. Finally, the only one who expresses a firm opinion is Steve Waugh, who says he’s not for it. ‘On only one occasion did I not get the eleven players I wanted,’ he says, ‘even though I wasn’t a selector.’ I can see how that happened – he is Steve Waugh. I am not sure if I, as captain, would have the same kind of personal authority from outside the selection room.

  It’s been an interesting interview. I don’t quite know what to make of the captaincy questions. In my three years as vice-captain, I have led Australia in a caretaker capacity when Ricky was injured in one-day series against Bangladesh and the West Indies, in occasional one-day internationals elsewhere, in the ICC World T20 event in the West Indies in 2010, a
nd in one Test match, the last we played, against England here at the SCG. But on every occasion, I felt like a stand-in and didn’t want to do anything that made it look like I was angling for the job. I hope my answers to the Argus Review haven’t created the wrong impression.

  A couple of months later, after we come home from a disappointing early exit in the 2011 World Cup, Cricket Australia’s operations manager Michael Brown and public affairs manager Peter Young drop in to my unit at Bondi. They tell me that Ricky stood down earlier today, and that Cricket Australia is inviting me to be captain of Australia in all three formats, starting with a coming one-day tour to Bangladesh. I’m gobsmacked. My first thoughts are about letting my parents and grandfather know, and my next thoughts are for Punter. I still don’t want to step on his toes. Michael and Peter say that he is available for selection for Bangladesh as a batsman, and that he has endorsed me as his successor. That means everything to me.

  If I’m to be captain, I will use what I have learnt from Ricky and others. I know that if I impose myself too strongly from the start, people will say I’ve been too eager to get the job . . . but, stuff it. If I hesitate, we might lose games, sink even lower than our current ranking of number five in the world, and I’ll be on the scrapheap. I have to be decisive straight-up.