My Story

by Michael Clarke

  As if this isn’t disastrous enough, my back is thoroughly gone by now. It’s been deteriorating for weeks, and the stress of the past week has finished the job. The medical staff say, ‘Get home for some tests and treatment. You need to get it right for the Ashes.’ I fly home as the Fourth Test in Delhi gets started, and am criticised for ‘abandoning’ the team. Watto flies back into India, back into the team, and is named captain. I’m feeling at my lowest since I was dropped by Australia seven years ago. The thing I am proudest of in my Test career is that I have not missed one match through injury. Given the underlying state of my back, it’s a real achievement. Not many people know about it, but I regard that ability to present myself as fit to play for Australia as a greater personal feat than any of the wins I’ve contributed to, or scores I’ve made.

  And now that’s gone.

  We lose in Delhi too, and Mickey is about to become the scapegoat for our failures. As I watch the Fourth Test on television from Sydney, I am in no doubt that the 4–0 series loss is the responsibility of us players, not Mickey. Some of the batsmen, like Ed Cowan and Phillip Hughes, have worked and worked and worked until they found a way to make runs by the end of the series. For the team, it’s unacceptable to bat first in all four matches, getting the best of the conditions, and not once make 500. We had to lift, collectively, to fill the experience gap left by Punter’s and Huss’s retirements, and instead we drifted in the opposite direction, letting the ‘one-percenters’ become ‘ten-percenters’ and costing us Test matches. Results-wise, it is the worst tour by an Australian team since 1970.

  At the end of the tour, Watto stands down from the vice-captaincy after discussions with Pat Howard. Brad Haddin is selected for the 2013 Ashes tour, and he will be my deputy. Watto and I have had a number of chats where we’ve talked about where he wants to go with his cricket and how to make amends for an unproductive Indian tour.

  For myself, the break between India and the Ashes is filled with rehab and training. I drive from home in Cronulla to my physio Steve Giulieri’s practice in Beecroft twice a day to work on the MedX machine, a contraption that has become as familiar to me in the past few years as my own bed. I sit in the MedX for short bursts while it bends me backward and forward, and then I do more treatment before another turn on the MedX. Steve is a saint, working out of his normal hours. His outlook is always positive, and I couldn’t get through this without him – in fact, I doubt I would have played for the past three years without him. Once I’m stronger, I have an intensive ‘boot camp’ with my personal trainer Duncan Kerr, who has known me since I was 17, in the Southern Highlands, something we do for two weeks a year in various locations. It’s always a great way for me to focus 24/7 on my physical and mental preparation. Duncan is a solid and loyal friend who always finds a way to get the most out of me. Then I head up to Brisbane for a couple of weeks at the Centre of Excellence, practising with the Ashes squad members who are still in Australia, rather than playing in the IPL or in county cricket.

  I also offer to stand down as a selector, something that was raised in a conversation I had with Rod Marsh and Allan Border during the Indian tour, but James Sutherland refuses. It was a big reform of the Argus Review to make the captain a selector, and James wants to stick with it, despite my misgivings and those of several former Australian captains.

  Over time, I’ve grown dissatisfied with the captain–selector role. I have been doing the full-time job of being a selector, and am seen by the players as determining their futures, with all the negative feelings that brings, and yet I am only having one vote out of five and don’t believe I exert much influence, even with Mickey supporting me. I only ever get what I want if I have the chairman onside.

  By 2013, it has turned into the worst of both worlds. I am distrusted by some players because I am on the panel, I’m fully accountable for our wins and losses, and yet I am not actually very influential. It’s got to the point where, in selection meetings for the 2013 Ashes tour, I walk in with three players in my head who I want to be on that tour, and I get none of the three.

  If I don’t have the support of the chairman and the senior selectors, what’s the point in taking the heat for their decisions? As I said to James Sutherland when I offered to resign, ‘You can’t expect me to be accountable for results if I have no say in the team selection.’ We are living in a different world from when I became captain in 2011.

  Physically, I am on the mend until four days after our arrival in England. I spend two days resting after the long flight, and then we have two practice games for the Champions Trophy, the one-day series known as the ‘mini-World Cup’. We haven’t been treating it as such: 90 per cent of our training in Brisbane was with red Dukes balls, and all the media questions I’ve been asked since my arrival in England have been about the Ashes. The Champions Trophy is being seen as something to get out of the way before the real tour begins.

  Before the second practice match in Cardiff, I go to the nets early. While facing some throwdowns I jump to avoid a short ball, and feel the nasty old grab in the right-hand side of my lower back. It knocks the breath out of me. The pain is bad, but nowhere near as sharp as the mental realisation of what this means. I’m going to miss the Champions Trophy, and will be wrestling with this for the whole tour. I go to hospital and receive four cortisone injections. The injections, as always, relieve the pain. Alex locates a MedX machine in London, and I’m driven back there for as many days of treatment as I can fit in.

  I’m in London while the boys go down in their first Champions Trophy group game, against England at Edgbaston, on Saturday 8 June. A bunch of them go out to a bar that night. I am unaware of anything untoward having gone on when, the next morning, I’m joined by Phillip Hughes, Matthew Wade and David Warner at a charity event put on by Shane Warne in London. Nobody mentions anything to me about their night out.

  Those three players return to Birmingham for the next game. At a fines meeting – a light-hearted tradition of touring teams that we’ve reinstated for this England tour – Matty Wade, as head of the committee, sanctions Watto for wearing a sweater rather than a training top at practice. It’s meant in jest, but Watto blows up and refuses to pay the fine.

  Meanwhile, players have spoken to Gavin Dovey and said, ‘Mickey Arthur should ask David Warner what happened on Saturday night.’ Mickey confronts David, who admits that some English players were at the bar, and a party wig was being passed around. England’s Joe Root put the wig on upside down and David, apparently taking offence at what he saw as an anti-Muslim slur, took a swing at him. David says he texted Root the next morning to apologise, and also spoke by phone to Root’s teammate Steve Finn. They concluded that everything was sweet and it wouldn’t go any further.

  It’s Monday night by the time Mickey finds out, and he’s not happy. As the one who laid down the new standard of behaviour in India, Mickey feels personally let down by Davey, who he has a lot of time for. Mickey calls me on the Tuesday morning in London. I’m absolutely ropeable. It’s not just what happened, but the fact that now I feel like I am the last person in the entire squad to know about it. I’m furious with Davey for not telling me on Sunday.

  When I chat with a number of the boys on the phone, I’m also angry at what they’re telling me about disharmony in the squad. Blokes are muttering about each other and about Mickey. Watto is still seething at what happened in India and what he perceives as inconsistencies in punishment: that he copped a major sanction for what he believed was a minor offence in India, and now feels picked on by the fines committee. The most troubling thing for me, being a few hours away from the team, is that Mickey’s bold action in Mohali clearly hasn’t brought about team unity and discipline. It has only set off a new chain of unwanted consequences.

  Mickey and I agree, in that phone call, that we should try to work out an appropriate disciplinary action within the team. But immediately, Cricket Australia come over the top of us and take it out of our hands. They will take any fu
rther step, which ends up as a ban for Davey lasting until the First Test at Trent Bridge. As this match will run back-to-back with the Lord’s Test match, it effectively means he will miss the first half of the Ashes series. Once his ban ends, he will join an Australia A team touring southern Africa while we play England in Nottingham and Lord’s. It’s a harsh but fair punishment. His actions in the bar were unacceptable for an Australian cricketer and a further indication of slack standards in the group.

  I step up my training and medical treatment, desperate to play in our first Ashes tour game against Somerset in Taunton next week. At the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, where we’re staying, I join the boys in the bar, to watch a rugby game on the other side of the world between Australia and the British Lions, and then go out for an early dinner with Kyly.

  As we’re walking out, I see James Sutherland and Pat Howard are in the reception area looking tense. They beckon me over and say we need to talk. We make a time for me to come back to the bar after dinner. I’m not surprised to see them, as they came to England to see how the Australia A team under Darren Lehmann are going. Their faces are tight as they invite me to sit on a stool in a quiet corner. Immediately I suspect something is up. They begin with some small talk before getting to the point.

  ‘Tomorrow we’re going to Bristol,’ James says, ‘to let Mickey know that he’s no longer required as our head coach, and we’re going to offer Darren Lehmann the job.’

  I am too dizzy to speak. I literally have to stop myself falling off my stool.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  Sacking Mickey? That was the last thing I thought James and Pat would want to talk about.

  ‘We wanted you to be the first to know,’ James says. ‘How do you feel about it? How will the team handle it?’

  I can’t even hear him above the noisy thoughts rushing in my head.

  ‘Mickey’s going to be shattered,’ I say. My first thoughts are for him, how he will feel. My second thoughts are about how much planning we have done together. Mickey and I have grown very, very close. The first Test match is 18 days away.

  ‘Are you sure it’s the right time?’ I say. ‘We’ve done so much planning together for this series.’

  There’s no point me pleading for Mickey to be retained. James and Pat have already decided. They begin speaking positively about what Boof can bring to the job. Both on and off the field, the team’s performances have been heading south. I see this as entirely the responsibility of the players, and me as the captain, and I don’t believe Mickey should take the rap for that. But James and Pat can’t sack the entire team at this point. Their action is to move on Mickey.

  ‘Also,’ James says, ‘we’re happy to accept your resignation as a selector now.’

  In the circumstances, that brings relief more than anything. Whether I remain a selector or not seems irrelevant at this moment. I have to take stock. Eighteen days to get myself fit and rebuild our approach to the Ashes without Mickey. I am stricken for him, knowing that his mother is very sick in South Africa.

  That night, when I get back to the room and sit there unable to sleep, my phone lights up. Mickey is calling from Bristol. Normally, we chat several times a day. But Pat has told me to say nothing to Mickey, as he is going to give him the bad news in Bristol tomorrow morning. I look at the phone, wondering whether I can lie to Mickey and have a normal conversation.

  I can’t. I let it ring out.

  As soon as Mickey has spoken to Pat the next day, he texts me. We speak soon after. I tell him how terrible we, the players, feel for him, and confess to a sense of guilt. Our performances are our fault, but he has paid the price.

  There’s worse news to come. I am devastated for Mickey when I hear that as he is flying home to Perth, his mother has passed away. Immediately, Mickey and his family rush to South Africa.

  I feel unmoored without him. We have had a great relationship for two years. I trust him, he trusts me, and we complement each other well. He has been the warm father figure for the team, and I’ve been the gadfly driving them to work harder and get intense about preparation and tactics. Until the Indian tour, with me leading and Mickey supporting, that was going well. Or at least I thought it was. On that tour, when he decided he had to show strength, it began to unravel for him.

  I thought Mickey was unfairly scapegoated. When we look back, Mohali will be seen as a turning point in team behaviour. Mitch Johnson, who had been lacking hunger and was troubled by injury for two years leading up to it, will be transformed. The Mitch who comes back in late 2013, having been banned for a match in India and then left out of the Ashes tour, is a different person. The amazing player and athlete inside him, the real Mitch, will come out. Everyone in the team will see it, and his transformation will inspire us all. Not that Mickey will ever get any credit for it, but Mitch’s renewal, and with it the team’s, started when we hit rock bottom in Mohali.

  After Mickey’s sacking, he and I continue texting and speaking for the next three weeks. The team plays quite well against some ordinary opposition in our two warm-up matches, and then we fall agonisingly close to pulling off a miraculous win in the First Test at Trent Bridge. It’s one of those sliding-doors moments: if we are able to get those last 15 runs and win the match, I believe we go on to win the Ashes comfortably. But when we fall short, it steadies England’s self-belief and shakes ours, and we melt away badly in the Second Test at Lord’s.

  On the eve of that match, I’m rocked again. Mickey has lodged a legal claim against Cricket Australia. They only offered him three months’ severance pay when he had another two years of his contract to run. Somehow, his statement of claim has leaked into the media and the most explosive part, which is all over the papers, is that Mickey says he had to be the ‘meat in the sandwich’ in the ‘feud’ between me and Watto. He says I called Watto a ‘cancer’ on the team.

  I am so angry I can’t speak. It’s the morning before the Second Test. I send Mickey a text telling him that it’s bullshit. I try to call him, and we play phone tag for a few hours but don’t talk. Publicly and privately, Mickey will deny leaking the statement, but that’s hardly the point.

  For me, the main thing is that I did not say that. What I did say, two years earlier – before the ‘Homeworkgate’ saga – was that I felt there were a number of players in our group whose behaviour was like ‘a tumour, and if we don’t cut it out, they’ll become a cancer’. I was referring to several players who were letting standards drop and weren’t behaving like Australian cricketers, who were whingeing behind the coach’s back about his decisions. It had been dealt with, and was not directed personally at Shane Watson.

  Now it is being re-cast as something new and fresh and personal between me and Watto. It was a private conversation between me and Mickey, and I had trusted him to keep it that way. I have never leaked anything he has said to me, not to a soul, let alone to the public, and I feel betrayed.

  The next thing I do is go to find Watto himself. He and I have covered some distance in improving our communications since India, and now this stuff from Mickey could wreck it. I find Watto in the restaurant having breakfast, surrounded by his wife Lee and other family members. I walk straight up, stand in front of them and say, ‘I’m really, really sorry that this shit has happened and it’s in the media.’ I am nearly in tears. I don’t try to justify it or explain what I said two years ago. I just have to apologise.

  When I’m finished, Lee thanks me for coming up and speaking to them. I don’t know if they accept my apology or hate me. We then go to Lord’s to practise, and get smashed in the Test match.

  There will be no difference afterwards, either for better or worse, in my relationship with Watto. Face to face, we will always be civil, and we will tour and play together for another two years. No change. We just get on and deal with it and try to win matches for Australia.

  Mickey, on the other hand, I wouldn’t speak to for the next three years. He lost my trust, and trust was the
foundation of our relationship. It would take me a long time to forgive him.

  He said later, about his time as Australian coach, that he had not been able to run things his own way. He blamed the constant involvement of Pat Howard, but the truth was that the system of leadership was changing around us. When I became Australian Test captain, I envisaged being a leader in the Mark Taylor–Ian Chappell mould. Mickey was helpful in supporting me, but Cricket Australia saw things moving in a different direction, where the powers of the Test captain were to be steadily narrowed down. Mickey’s removal clarified that. The capacity of James Sutherland and Pat Howard to come in and decide on the coach without asking the captain beforehand was a big neon-lit message to me. Removing me as a selector was another. Restoring the authority of the captaincy, as I had envisaged it in 2011, was not what Cricket Australia had in mind.

  As the system changes in 2013, I feel left behind. Ian Chappell is saying to me, more and more, ‘The Win–Loss record goes against your name. So why aren’t you taking the boys for a beer? Why aren’t you choosing the bowling coach? Why aren’t you choosing this player?’

  All I can say is, ‘Mate, it doesn’t work like that anymore. I’m not in charge of any of that. I’m in charge of tossing the coin and whatever happens on the field. The rest is up to others.’

  Chappelli can’t work that out. When he was captain, the captain was boss. And I have trouble adapting to it as well. In my first two years, I brought back the idea of past players joining the team camp in the lead-up to a Test match and presenting debutants with their baggy green. In Melbourne, I asked Dean Jones and Bill Lawry to be around the boys. In Adelaide, I invited Greg Blewett and Jamie Siddons. I love reintroducing that tradition. That is my personality, how I am helping us get to number one in the world, how I was brought up, how I saw my grade captains and my dad lead their teams, how I saw Warney at Hampshire. Nothing would happen in the team without the captain having the final call.