More than a decade and a half since the infamous Michael Clarke’s locker room with Simon Katich, the incident ramifications continue to echo through the Australian cricket circles while the former test skipper is ostracized by his teammates.
From the point of view of the cricket, it would be just to argue that not only Clarke lived up to the expectations which were granted to him as generational talent, but he may have exceeded them.
But while the quadruple winner of the Allan border medal will fall statistically as one of the greats of the modern era, he did not win the almost universal love reserved for some of his contemporaries.
On a recent podcast, sports journalists Phil Rothfield and Andrew Webster revealed that Clarke’s ex-teams did not have much to do with him, without any presence at his 40th anniversary celebrations-and some do not arise from his confrontation with Katich.
The last test of the 2009 series against South Africa in SCG should be recalled as the last appearance of Matthew Hayden for Australia. Or for Graeme Smith who strikes with a broken hand while the Proteas became the first team to win a series of tests in Australia for 15 years.
But the two were overshadowed by a ugly confrontation between Katich and Clarke in the locker room.
Many Australian cricket players keep their distances from the old Australian skipper Michael Clarke (photo with his girlfriend Arabella Sherbourne)
Clarke (right) and Simon Katich were involved in ugly confrontation at SCG in 2009
Clarke was unleashed with frustration in the face of delays on the performance of under the southern cross, I stand because he had other plans far from the team – and Katich caught him by the gorge while the confrontation degenerates.
He stressed how much Clarke was different from Katich, who was a blue cricket player at the old school.
A month later, it appeared that Clarke was impatient to leave the SCG because he had a reservation in a bar to celebrate the end of the summer of the test.
The details of the confrontation were not exposed in 2016, when Clarke said its version of events in its autobiography.
He said that Katich and Michael Hussey, who was then in charge of the team’s song, orchestrated the delay to deliberately annoy him and spoil his plans.
“Huss (Hussey) and” Kato “(Katich) seem to appreciate the delay more and more, especially at my expense,” wrote Clarke.
“I think I hear them say something like:” F *** that, let’s wait a little longer “. And then I lose it.
“Hang on, you do this out of spite, you f *** Ing Dogs. Have the balls to say it in the face. Kato triggers: “What did you say?”
Clarke said Katich had caught him when the situation was heated and thought that his teammate was about to physically attack him
Clarke (photo of ex-fiancée Lara Bingle) did not win the almost universal love reserved for some of his contemporaries
Mitchell Johnson (right) said that under Clarke captain, the Australian team atmosphere became “ very toxic ” with several players who did not want to take on the field
“I said I have the balls to say it on my face, you weak C ** S.
Shortly after Clarke resumed the captain in 2011, Katich was surprisingly reduced from the list of centralized contractual players in Australia cricket.
The opening striker had been a rock for Australia, with an average of 50.48 in 33 tests at the top of the order, and he pinned his demotion to the 2009 crash at the SCG.
“You do not need to be Einstein to understand that it was not only the selectors who participated in sending me on my way,” he said in a barely veiled excavation in Clarke in 2011.
Webster and Rothfield have explained that Katich is not the only ex-team who has moved away from “PUP”-revealing that no ex-team came to his 40th anniversary party.
“He became clear from there (Katich’s incident) how distant Michael Clarke was from the rest of this cricket side,” Webster said on the Podcast Off The Record.
“I heard that for his 40th birthday, there was no cricket. Which is good, but it just showed that Clarkey is a different cat.
“You also see all these great former test crickets that are either in the Fox box or the ABC, but I have never seen it in the Sydney test, and it does not seem to be part of the reunion.”
Clarke said that one of his greatest regrets was to fall with his teammate Andrew Symonds (photo together), whom he sent back to Darwin’s house in 2008 because he went to fish instead of attending a team meeting
The pair was great comrades for several years – but friendship did not last
Clarke had resembled the Australian elected captain since his debut in the test and he finally took the coat in 2011 when Ricky Ponting resigned.
Clarke won 24 of his 47 tests as a skipper and his captain was a roller-coaster. If the highest point was a whitening on England in the ashes 2013-2014, there were a lot of low points to choose.
Australia lost the ashes in England in 2013 and 2015, Clarke criticizing the attitude of certain players of the former tour as a “tumor”.
A 4-0 battery in India in 2013 came while Clarke and the coach of the time Mickey Arthur suspended four players, including Mitchell Johnson, in what has become known as “saga of homework”.
Clarke is also famous with the late Andrew Symonds – and has never been able to repair friendship.
The first important cracks in their friendship appeared in the series of India-Australia 2007-2008 tests held in Australia when the infamous “Monkeygate” scandal broke.
Symonds allegedly alleged that Indian holder Harbhajan Singh had called him a “monkey” in an animated altercation. India argued that the controversial spinner had said “Teri Ma Ki” (your mother), which is an insult in Hindi.
Clarke won this test in Sydney in the final during the day, but Symonds said his companion had not been back when the case was transported to the referee of the Mike Procter match.
“The evidence of the stump microphone has disappeared. It was just one thing after another. It weighed heavily on me. I started drinking a lot. I had the Australian captain Ricky who supported me. Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden supported me. They were good friends and are still, ” said Symonds on the Brett Lee podcast.
The quadruple winner of the Allan border medal will fall as one of the great in the modern era
The versatile star opened its doors on its fault with Michael Clarke to reveal jealousy and money separated the pair when he spoke on the Brett Lee podcast last month.
He thought that Clarke became envious when he signed a huge $ 1.8 million contract with Deccan Chargers in the Indian Premier in 2008.
“Matthew Hayden told me-when IPL started, I had a nice penny to play in the IPL-he identified it because there was a little jealousy that potentially entered the relationship there,” he told Podcast.
“Money does funny things. It’s a good thing, but it can be a poison and I think he may have poisoned our relationship.
Their partnership ended in 2008, when Symonds was sent home after a test match in Darwin when he chose to fish during a compulsory team meeting. He felt that Clarke – who was a test captain at that time – betrayed him.
