Half past four, Friday afternoon. An edge to slip, a catch, the start of the slow walk back to the pavilion. MJ Clarke c Bell b Wood 13. It will not be his last Test innings, since the selectors have indulged his desire to lead Australia in one more Test at The Kia Oval. But it was the one that changed his mind. The day before this Test started, Clarke had said “I’m not retiring”. The night before it ended, he decided he was going to do exactly that.
“I tried to be as positive as I possibly could right to the end,” he said after play. “For the team’s sake and for my sake as well. I wanted to give myself and the team every opportunity to come out and play well in this Test match.” When they failed he found, all of a sudden, that he felt it was time to go.
Later on Friday evening, Clarke talked it through with his wife, and then again with his great friend Shane Warne. By Saturday morning, he was sure. At 6.15am, Clarke sent a text to Darren Lehmann. “Are you awake? Can you ring me?” They spoke. Lehmann was shocked, but supportive. So were the rest of the team.
“I made the decision last night,” Clarke said. “It’s not like it has been coming for the last six months, it’s not like I planned it. Win or lose, who knows, I might have still been here saying the same thing.”
The news broke an hour before the start of play and was confirmed 40 minutes later in a TV interview with Warne on Channel 9. They did it on the outfield while England were in the middle of their lap of honour.
In the background all the while, Steve Smith, ‘Smitty’, as Clarke calls him. Already anointed, if not actually appointed. He had a stint in charge while Clarke was out injured during the series against India. At the start of play on Saturday, Smith eased himself into the chair at Lehmann’s right-hand side on the dressing-room balcony. Clarke lingered over them for a while, then turned back inside and left them to it.
“Smitty is ready,” Clarke said. “He has had the opportunity in the Australian summer and showed that he is going to make a good captain. Only time will tell but I have got a lot of faith in him. I believe in him and I believe in the Australian team.”
It seems one thing Clarke stopped believing in is his own form, so bad that the team have been playing “with 10 men”, as he put it after the third Test. He lasted 15 balls in the first innings here, each one almost as painful to watch as it must have been for him to play. He was once the most nimble of batsmen, but now he was sluggish and stiff. He flapped his bat at the short balls, heaved it at the full ones. He said that he had been trying to attack Stuart Broad’s bowling. “I was thinking ‘if he pitches it up I’m going to hit it as far as I can’.” That seemed strange when he said it, symptomatic, perhaps of his confused thinking in this series. Clarke’s top score was the 38 he made in the first innings at Cardiff. Since then, 4, 7, 32, 10, 3, 10, 13. Altogether 117 at 16.71. He may not have known the end was coming. But a lot of people watching did.
There were a few tears, during another on-air chat with Mike Atherton. But Clarke insisted that he was not upset. “I’m not sad. I’m more disappointed with the way we played through this series, and the way I played as captain. I’m not sad about this because I believe it is the right time to walk away. I’ve been blessed to have the career I’ve had. I’ve played over 100 Test matches for my country, I’ve been part of some amazing teams.”
So he has. Clarke is the last to quit of the last great Australian team, 11 years after he made his Test debut against India. Among his team-mates then, Adam Gilchrist, Justin Langer, Matthew Hayden. As they slipped into retirement, Clarke came to shoulder more and more of the load, until at times he seemed to carry the batting on his own. “I don’t think you want it easy,” he said at one point. And he rarely had it that way.
Clarke won the World Cup twice, and has been part of two Australian teams that whitewashed England 5-0. At the same time, he has never won a series in England and has lost more matches to them as captain than any of his predecessors.
“My career, like my batting, there’s been highs and lows,” he said. “I’ve tried to ride the wave when I’ve been on top, and I’ve tried to fight my way back when I’ve been down.”
The peak, he said, was 2007, the year Australia won the Ashes 5-0 and then the World Cup. The trough may very well have been this summer when his team fell apart around him and he was powerless to do anything about it. But few will remember his desperate innings this summer. They will think, instead, of the many wonderful ones he played in the years before it.
