The Shorter Wisden 2013 (17 page)

Excitement, disappointment, re-endearment, respect: this is the not uncommon J-curve for a major cricketer. In Clarke, the plotted points read something like this: infatuation, disillusionment,
rehabilitation and, last year, awe. It is a capital J-curve, exaggerated in proportion to his talent.

Clarke arrived with a gift, but in public estimation then acquired baggage, and has taken until recently to shed it. Like Steve Waugh, he is from Sydney’s unpretentious western suburbs.
Unlike Waugh, he was seen to develop pretensions – glamour girlfriend, fast car, endorsements portfolio – until it seemed Australia saw more of him straddling the centrefold crease than
the batting crease. In a country in which the buzzword for two decades or more has been aspiration, this would not have mattered, except it led to a presumption that he was neglecting his cricket
and squandering his privilege.

Clarke’s rise coincided with Australia’s decline. This made him an easy scapegoat, most acutely at the end of the 2010-11 Ashes fiasco. When a dressing-room altercation two years
earlier with the flinty Simon Katich finally became known, the public sided with Katich, believing the scrapper had taken the pretty boy down a notch. And when Clarke decamped briefly from a tour
of New Zealand to deal with the break-up of his relationship, the late Peter Roebuck tore strips off him for dereliction of duty.

In Cricket Australia’s high office, Clarke was thought to lack the necessary gravitas. To this day, it is hard to imagine him delivering a Bradman-style dissertation, or even a Mark
Taylor-style reflection. He speaks plentifully, but with a side-of-the-mouth tic, and an almost perverse resolve to stick to the team-first dictum, even when a little personal elaboration would
cause no offence. He is no one’s idea of a statesman.

But nor is he the shallow and indolent playboy of popular imagination. He works hard at his game; the legacy is a chronically sore back. He spurned the modern cynosure of the Indian Premier
League at its formation to stay home with his ill father. When he suspected Twenty20 was retarding his development, he gave it away at international level altogether. Fortified, Clarke began to
answer critics and doubters in the only idiom he knew: runs, runs, and more runs.

In Clarke’s batting maturity, five precepts are evident. The first is range. With an unerring eye, he affronts the ball on the rise as assuredly as anyone can ever have done. Yet he also
plays so late that bowlers and slips throw up their hands in anticipation of the lbw that rarely comes. For bowlers, there is almost no margin for error; for Clarke, a repertoire lacking only the
hook shot.

The second is the natural’s gift of timing. Late in 2012 against Sri Lanka, while hampered by injury at Hobart and Melbourne, he would stab down on yorkers with no thought other than of
survival, yet still the ball would squirt from his bat like a pip from an orange.

The third is a delightfully twinkle-toed approach to spin bowling, so at odds with the modern modus of swatting from the crease.

The fourth is temperament. He is capable of batting for hours and days at a consistent tempo, through lulls, beyond spurts and notwithstanding scares. Sometimes, even when compiling an enormous
score, he looks oddly vulnerable, almost inept, particularly to bowling aimed at his head. But he shrugs off these moments as he might flies, regards a gram of luck as the reasonable corollary of
kilograms of estimable batting, and his innings rolls on.

The fifth, encompassing all four, is strength of character, irreconcilable with his erstwhile image, but now undeniable. Immediately on returning to New Zealand after sorting out his domestic
crisis, he answered the howling reproof with a century.

In the wake of the Ashes, Clarke replaced Ricky Ponting as Test captain and, as Australian cricket modernised, he was made a selector too. This imposed on him a heft of responsibility few
previous captains have had to bear, liable to crush a faint mind. His stream of runs increased to an outpouring. In his first 21 matches in charge, he averaged 69, with eight hundreds.

Moreover, he quickly revealed himself as an intuitive and adventurous leader in the Taylor mould. Never, if he can help it, does he let a match stand still, or simply run its course. He makes
judicious declarations, sets designer fields, rotates bowlers often, and is unafraid to tear up the rulebook, trusting instead in his instinct. When trying to bowl out stubborn Sri Lanka at Hobart,
he gave an over to wicketkeeper Matthew Wade. In the bald context of this essay, perhaps that sounds gimmicky. In the match, it altered the rhythms. Australia won.

In 2012, we witnessed a full flowering of the lavish batting talent announced so spectacularly all those years ago in Bangalore. The year began with 329 not out against India, the biggest Test
innings ever played at the SCG, curtailed only by his own declaration, with Bradman’s (and Taylor’s) 334 one hit away. Even then, some suspected he was playing for public favour. A
double-century followed at Adelaide before, at the start of the 2012-13 season, free-hitting back-to-back doubles against South Africa. He rounded off the year with his first century in a Boxing
Day Test, against Sri Lanka, compiled while nursing a pinched hamstring that reduced him to walking between the wickets, but made no appreciable difference to the sweetness of his strokeplay. His
score, 106, was also his calendar-year average; only Bradman, Sobers and Ponting before him had reached New Year’s Eve on such a plane. And his 2012 Test aggregate of 1,595 placed him nearly
350 runs clear of his nearest rival, Alastair Cook.

As 2013 began, Clarke deserved to feel content: all the caps fitted. He was 31 – prime batting age – rich in form and circumstance, with a low-profile wife and few of his old
affectations. He had earned rave reviews as a batsman and captain; under him, an experimental Australian team had lost only one of seven series, to top-ranked South Africa. The ambivalence of
public and critics was forgotten, except in one detail: a perception that he should bat higher than No. 5. While an in-form Ponting was ahead of him, it didn’t matter, but a succession of
greenhorns had since been exposed. Clarke could reasonably answer that it had been decades since the best batsman axiomatically arrived at No. 3. But No. 4 seemed sensible.

Still, mountains loomed. The retirements of Ponting and Mike Hussey a month apart left Clarke as the only fixture in Australia’s batting order, isolating him as no one had been since Allan
Border, and imposing on him an Atlas-size burden, as a still-insubstantial team contemplated two Ashes series. Though his own man as captain, he depended on Ponting for almost grandfatherly
support; that is gone. More even than Ponting ever was, Clarke is both captain and batting fulcrum. And it looks like being the making of him.

THE LEADING CRICKETER IN THE WORLD

Players can be chosen more than once for this award.

50 YEARS OF TOURING ENGLAND

T
ONY
C
OZIER

Nepotism has got itself a bad name, so I’ll plump for “fatherly favouritism” as the catalyst for my career, which has tracked cricket’s most exciting,
erratic and exasperating team for more than half a century. This year, sober to relate, marks 50 since I first covered a West Indies tour of England.

Jimmy Cozier was, at various times, editor of three West Indian papers, before setting up his own, the Barbados
Daily News
, in 1960. In England in 1950, he had been the lone Caribbean
chronicler of a series that first established West Indies as a genuine force. Presumably he considered his only son his logical successor. His present on my eighth birthday was the 1948
Wisden
; seven years later, he got permission for me to be excused from school in Barbados so I could file for St Lucia’s
The Voice
(circulation 2,500) during the Kensington
Oval Test against Australia. He sent me off to university in Ottawa to study for a journalism degree, but the arctic winters and lack of cricket on the curriculum prematurely ended that
venture.

So I recognised he was a soft touch when I put it to him that I should cover West Indies in England in 1963 for the
Daily News
. The deal was that the paper would look after the flight
and provide a modest stipend, beyond which I would fend for myself. It meant staying in YMCAs and B&Bs unless I could bunk up with school friends who had gone on to further studies in the UK;
at 23, it was hardly an imposition.

I spent the summer criss-crossing the counties, hitching a ride in the team’s baggage van or the Ford Zephyr of Roy Lawrence, the melodious Jamaican who was the West Indian voice on
Test Match Special
. My daily reports were tapped out by typewriter on to special mustard-coloured cable forms (specimens still available at any reputable museum), and filed at the nearest
post office – in London I tended to use the Embankment – for transmission to Barbados. It was a tiresome business.

On the back of the 1960-61 tour of Australia, that 1963 trip proved another triumph. Frank Worrell, in his final series, was again the revered, level-headed leader of the brilliant young brigade
he had nurtured: Garry Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, Wes Hall, Lance Gibbs, now joined by Charlie Griffith. Denis Compton rated it “undoubtedly the best cricketing side in the world”. As soon
as Basil Butcher stroked the winning runs in the final Test to secure the inaugural Wisden Trophy, created to mark the 100th edition of the Almanack, the Oval outfield was engulfed in a joyous
tsunami, it seemed, of every one of the thousands of West Indians who had made their homes in south London a decade earlier. By the end of the summer, MCC had altered West Indies’ tour cycle
to England from six or seven years to three or four. Worrell’s knighthood in the New Year’s honours was the perfect way to top things off. It all made for good copy. Circulation at the
Daily News
took an upturn. Cozier senior was delighted. My future was set.

Through the bad times that have overtaken West Indies cricket, and even through the good, when they twice stood unquestionably at the pinnacle of the world game (first in the mid-1960s, then for
15 years until the mid-1990s), there have been confusion and controversy. This was inevitable, perhaps, given the existence of a dozen nations, all with their own governments, anthems and flags,
and united only by a game bequeathed to them by British colonialism.

So there has never been a dull moment. And without the initial paternal push, I might otherwise have been confined to some humdrum occupation. The alternative has taken me to vastly different
locations: they don’t get more disparate than Peshawar and Dunedin, or Chittagong and Canberra. I’ve delighted in the constantly passing parade of great players and great matches. As a
television commentator, I’ve been first-hand witness to the revolutionary changes instituted by Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, as well as the Twenty20 tournaments that have
transformed cricket’s character. And, before the elimination of Test-match rest days, there was always the fun of Sunday games on English village greens with press teams or Brian
Scovell’s intrepid Woodpeckers.

By the time I returned to England in 1966, radio commentary had been added to my roster. When Roy Lawrence, by now head of Radio Jamaica’s sports coverage, was summoned back for the
Commonwealth Games in Kingston in August,
TMS
agreed to his recommendation that I should fill in for the Headingley Test. The prospect of joining famous men whose voices we had listened to
since schooldays was intimidating; a combination of the presence of an even younger first-timer by the name of Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the relaxed ambience, and a West Indies innings victory
proved an ideal introduction. Like the entire summer, the match was dominated by the incomparable Sobers (174 runs, eight for 80). He was later eulogised in a calypso by the Mighty Sparrow as
“the greatest cricketer on earth or Mars”. I certainly have seen none better.

I’ve been on
TMS
for every West Indian tour of England since, and it has led to many similar assignments elsewhere. There have been the predictable clashes with passionate fans
back home, but only once has the
TMS
connection caused any strife. BBC Radio Four used to insist on having a commentator at the ground from 8am to set the scene for the day’s play. I
had drawn the short straw for the final day of the 1984 Lord’s Test, but I’d forgotten my special MCC pass, and the ageing steward – protecting the North Gate as if with his life
– refused me entrance. Panicking that I’d miss my slot, I pressed the accelerator and moved slowly forward, only for the steward, by now red-faced with indignation, to throw himself
across the bonnet. The intervention of his West Indian colleague, whom I’d known from Barbados, saved the day. “Just pay the £10 parking fee, Tony,” was his common-sense
solution. The report lasted 90 seconds.

Such was West Indies’ command in Wisden Trophy contests in those days that you turned up wondering not if they would win, but by how much. The transformation has been abrupt and complete.
From 1973 to 1989-90, they won 25 Tests to England’s two, among them a pair of 5–0 blackwashes. Since 2000, the count favours England 17–2, including a 4–0 whitewash. This
is one reason – along with health and safety – why West Indians no longer swarm across the outfields at The Oval and Lord’s. It is no longer
their
team, as it was their
grandparents’. While the current generation have gravitated to football and athletics, the disenchantment is left to their relations back home. And for all the happiness over last
year’s victory at the World Twenty20 in Sri Lanka, an overall revival is likely to be a long time coming.