The Michael Clarke Test

Malcolm Knox, in the Sydney Morning Herald, says having ridden in on a bat with no name, Michael Clarke can claim naming rights to the 100th Test at the SCG.

Success for Clarke seems to spark the same public reaction as failure: a national referendum on the crucial question of whether he is a good bloke. With recent captains such as Ponting, Steve Waugh, Mark Taylor and Allan Border, people thought they knew already. With some, they didn't care one way or the other. Perhaps Michael Clarke: Saintly Hero or Axe Murderer? is for Channel Nine to ask its viewers. This rather bizarre fretfulness over his immortal soul is something he shares in common with Don Bradman, as well as now being Test triple-century-makers.

The wicket of Sachin Tendulkar was the game's last staging post. In the karmic way of these things, it fell to Clarke, writes Greg Baum in the same paper.

It was a Test match played on an epic scale, but won in the end by shifts - hunches, quirks, ricochets and deviations - so small as to be almost imperceptible ... Clarke in this match demonstrated touches both exquisite and Midas. He spent all but 40 minutes of it on the ground. He is making a new name for himself, and it was written all over this Test.

Michael Clarke batted in a baggy green for a while during his epic 329, and Barney Ronay, writing in the Guardian, says "batting in a cap makes all cricketers look more dashing, more complete and more poignant."

For Clarke the cap resembled a set of laurels this week. The new captain has been coddled by his countrymen and celebrated by the English and Australian media after four hundreds in his last seven Tests. Once dismissed by some as insufficiently flinty, he has begun to look instead manly and classical. There is an unencumbered quality about this sandy-haired creature who speaks to something gay and celebratory in the way Australia would like to see itself. For all its newness Australia can still be an oddly nostalgic country, in love with its own romantic near-past. To this end the delicious mawkishness of Clarke's declaration in Sydney with his own score just shy of Don Bradman's sacred 334 may have an element of PR about it, but as a register of manly sporting romance it hits all the right big fat happy notes. A triple hundred. A series win. A cap. It looks like an era under way.

In the Independent, Chris McGrath writes: "If he discovered a cure for cancer in the morning, sorted out global warming in the afternoon, and paid off the national deficit before going to bed, someone would still mutter something about Michael Clarke just showing off."

It's all very odd. With an average of 62 in 17 Test innings as captain, you would think Australian pragmatists might pardon Clarke his perceived heterodoxies. Instead they agonise pathetically about his image. They were appalled by his admission that he sobbed on the sofa with his father after losing his Test place in 2005. Some may even have been mischievously gratified that his Herculean deeds this week were played out against swathes of pink, from the stands to the stumps (in support of the Jane McGrath cancer foundation). Yet here is a man who sacrificed the joyous freedom of his game in the cause of a team in decline; who is proving a most adept captain, not least in respectful rehabilitation of Ponting.