Sunday Times - February 9, 2014
TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg
Graeme Smith wouldn’t look, sound or act out of place at your mate’s braai. Drinks his beer from the bottle. Puts his jacket around his wife’s shoulders. Doesn’t fuss about fetching another bag of wood from the garage. Seems your basic decent bloke.
Michael Clarke arrives in a roar of finely-tuned torque, a flash of teeth and tattoos, and a tight shirt. His eyes burn a hole in the night. The fire flickers flaccidly. He revives it by pointing his intensely focused finger. You wonder who this rock star is.
Mickey Arthur doesn’t have to wonder about Smith or Clarke. Having coached SA from 2005 to 2010 and Australia from 2011 to last year, he is unusually well-placed to comment on what will be a compelling subplot to the test tussle between their teams that starts in Centurion on Wednesday.
“They differ in character, but there are also a lot of similarities between them,” Arthur said from Sydney this week. “Both of them have a fantastic aura with their teams. They both prepare thoroughly and are complete professionals.
“When they walk into a dressingroom they command respect. They are dynamic in terms of their leadership, but they are also full of fun and love a joke.
“You’ve got to have cricket smarts to captain a test team, and they both have that in abundance.
“It’s going to be very competitive between the two of them, and that is going to lead to very competitive cricket in the series.
“They are going to try an outsmart each other and win the tactical battle. They’ll be striving to get the smallest advantage over each other.”
Perhaps because Arthur’s Australian stint is fresher in his memory, or perhaps because there was something to reports of a breakdown between him and Smith when he resigned as SA’s coach - Smith is wont to point out with a snappy, “Mickey never could hold his beer”, the patch of carpet in the Wanderers dressingroom where Arthur puked a celebratory drink after the 438 game - Arthur had more to say about Clarke than about Smith.
“Michael Clarke is a perfectionist, from the way he prepares for a match to the way he dresses.”
But what about the rock star image, which has not always sat well with the folks he left behind in the blue-collar western suburbs of Sydney that gave cricket to Clarke and Clarke to cricket?
“When he was a youngster you could say that, but Michael has done a lot to change that perception,” Arthur said. “He came from a working class family. Then he got the fame, the beautiful girls, the fantastic cars, and the chance to live at Bondi Beach. Now he’s matured.”
Schedule permitting, Clarke still goes back to those frayed parts of town to captain his club, Western Suburbs, at Pratten Park, the sunstruck brick, concrete, corrugated iron and grass structure that could easily serve as a metaphor for everything robustly Australian.
On Australia’s previous tour to SA, in November, 2011, Clarke took several minutes out of a training session at Kingsmead to talk field placings with a suitably starstruck young net bowler.
Smith has done a noticeable chunk of his growing up since marrying Morgan Deane in August, 2011. Now a father of two, he radiates completion. But some things do not change.
“A large part of captaincy is not just about making a decision on the field,” Smith said in explaining what being the boss means to him.
“I have been in the job for 11 years. Every tour, you know you’ve got to front up. When it’s a big series, that feeling is heightened. It never goes away.”
The feeling will be back on Wednesday, in the bloke as well as in the rock star.
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