Michael Clarke toiled away in a net rigged up in the middle of Trent Bridge. His only company was Australian batting coach Michael Di Venuto, who was flinging balls at him, using a woomera-like device.
The balls Clarke hit were scattered around them, and on the outfield, like marbles. His isolation was both absolute and a deception. Although few were watching this day, everyone was on his case, and Clarke could not help but intuit it. The perceived descent of a great sportsman is unavoidably a ghoulish business.
Whether this is the end or just the beginning of the end, it is the day that must come. If this was television, we would now split the screen. This day came to Ricky Ponting a little less than four years ago, in South Africa. Ponting hadn't made a Test century for nearly two years, and not even a 50 for a year. He began that short series with scores of 8, 0 and 0, and all of Australia was on Ponting-watch, popcorn and blankets at the ready. He was nearly 37 years old.
Ponting's answer was nets, nets and more nets. It is Clarke's now, too. He was offered a week off between the second and third Tests to refresh his mind, but declined. "It's not me," he said. It is true, as it was true of Ponting. In South Africa, when Australia's bowlers had had enough and the last of the net bowlers was exhausted, he turned to a bowling machine. Both men, with crisis upon them, opted for more practice, not less. They would make up in the nets the time they were not spending in the middle. To deal with the abnormal, they would try to be doubly normal.
For Ponting, it worked. He ground out a half-century in a winning effort in Johannesburg at the end of that tour, then had a prolific home series against India. But a bell had tolled. When mortality came knocking again 12 months later, he hesitated only momentarily before announcing his retirement.
So there is hope yet for Clarke. But studied more closely, the split-screen images reveal subtle differences. In his three failures in South Africa, Ponting was out exactly the same way, lbw to balls aimed at leg stump. It was a flaw that had developed in his game, and would linger even after he returned to Australia, but it was one he could work to remedy, hence all those hours in front of the bowling machine. As only a great player could, he managed to put Humpty back together again for a while.
Clarke's five dismissals in this series could hardly have been more different. Recapitulating quickly: caught and bowled by Moeen Ali, caught in gully from Stuart Broad, caught pulling to square leg from Mark Wood, bowled by yorker from Steve Finn, and caught at third slip from Finn. Find the next number in that sequence if you can. It betrays not so much a technical bug as a mental block. Former England captain Michael Vaughan suggested he had lost the faith of his previous attacking conviction and was stuck in two minds. It is not necessarily something that more nets can sort out. But until and unless he finds a groove again in the middle, more nets is all he has.
When the contemporary image of Clarke is laid over the archival image of Ponting, there are other differences. Ponting was no longer captain, which somehow made his a personal rather than national crisis. And although Australia was humiliated in the first Test in Cape Town when they were bowled out for 47, they squared the series in Johannesburg, mitigating fault all round. If Clarke loses the Ashes, it will be a case of no runs and nowhere to hide.
So there was Clarke, beavering away in the nets, pausing only every 10 minutes or so to change gloves. The way he hit the ball was sweet to both eye and ear, and when necessary he even ducked it with aplomb. It was the same at team nets a little later. Doubtlessly, a couple of young Notts bowlers went home with a new and finer appreciation of what line and length means. Here was a reminder of what both he and we have been missing.
But also here, the two images, Ponting and Clarke, become one. Test batsmen generally hit the ball well in the nets. Sometimes, it deludes a batsman about himself. Sometimes, it puzzles him, that all this natural ball-striking ability is amounting to nothing in the middle; it did Ponting for a while. But the nets are not the middle. There, a man is even more alone than in a solo practice session. The discerning judgment the selectors soon must make is whether Clarke is merely out of form and luck, or out of time.
Originally, chief selector Rod Marsh had not intended to attend Monday's training. Suddenly, dressed all in black, he was there anyway.
