Pup misses a couple of meaningless one dayers against New Zealand to be with Bingle and all of a sudden the dogs are barking. Photo: Sergio Dionisio
Michael Clarke went home early from work to handle some personal business. So what?
As a describer of cricket, its idiosyncrasies and peculiar rhythms and rituals, Peter Roebuck is damn near without parallel in this country.
In a piece prominently displayed in today's papers - it is on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald - the nation's best cricket writer turns his attentions towards the tawdry little soap opera that has latterly exploded around Brendan Fevola, Lara Bingle and Michael Clarke.
In just a few hundred words Roebuck has the part-time model, full-time celebrity as Cleopatra to Pup's Marc Antony (the Roman General not the latin R'n'B performer), as an "unstable woman" in danger of throwing a good man off course, and as - most Hitchcockian of all - a "femme fatale" who "craves attention and courts controversy".
Scary stuff.
Whatever the issues that caused Australia's captain-in-waiting to head back across the ditch for a few days, they are all her fault, of her making and his responsibility to "sort out".
Apparently, if he doesn't sort them soon then civilisation, as we know it, will decline and fall.
It all seems a little excessive doesn't it?
Whatever you think of Bingle, and I wouldn't have a clue, it doesn't really matter. On the available facts she is a blameless victim of Fevola's stupidity. On rumour and gossip, maybe she is something else. It should not matter either way. Clarke is her partner, he evidently loves her and there are clearly some things he either wants to sort out or help her deal with. It is surely not such an uncommon thing, one that has probably caused many of us to take a pass on work for a short time.
Clarke's decision to go home from New Zealand - from a dull, meaningless series against a not-especially pulsating opponent - has been greeted with a vitriolic, hyperbolic barrage of bouncers that are so far over the top even Billy Bowden would have correctly identified them as no-balls.
Ian Chappell - that icon of contemporary thought and modern sensibility - says it is not good enough, observing: ''The first thing you need in an Australian captain is someone who is going to be there all the time.''
Steve Waugh - one might remember - gave up the captaincy of the Australian one-day team to focus on test cricket. He left that game altogether and his absence hardly cost him any skin, much less a special place in the affections of our distinguished former prime minister.
But Pup misses a couple of meaningless one-dayers against New Zealand and all of a sudden the dogs are barking. Not captaincy material.
Roebuck said in his opening line: ''Michael Clarke needs to choose between a fraught personal life and his career in cricket.'' Does he? Why? It is hard to escape the conclusion that Clarke's problem is neither that he left the team (as others have done for various personal reasons at different times) nor that he abandoned his mates during a particularly important moment (in fact it was amid a tour against dull old New Zealand featuring the suddenly-prosaic 50-over form of the game). His problem is that he left for a woman. His life is being ruled by a skirt. To be brutally crude, he is pussy-whipped. Apparently, we don't like that.
Cricket and football and all major sports now treat their stars as celebrities. In recent times that has been extended further to their partners. WAGS: it's a hideous acronym for a hideous concept, that the place of women in these sports is as adornment to boost the status of players but also the code itself, to lift the red-carpet glamour of Brownlow or Allan Border medal night.
With celebrity status comes celebrity scrutiny. We are urged all at once to obsess over the private lives of these people and yet to pass judgment when they are deemed distasteful or messy. If Michael Clarke is Marc Anthony, then Bingle isn't Cleopatra. More like J-Lo.
For a group of people for whom doing nothing has risen to the level of an art form, much is expected of the WAG. As Roebuck puts it: ''Most top class sportsmen marry young and well. Their wives provide the counterpoint ambition requires. Accordingly, they can focus on their cricket.''
These women must, in turns, be glamorous and titillating but also chaste, constant, compliant and willing to retreat into the background when not required on that red carpet. What happens on tour stays on tour, but if the lonely WAG back at home escapes her leash then it's a mighty big problem.
In this world, the WAG can only be seen as caricature. She is either a saint, like Jane McGrath, or a temptress, like Bingle. Clarke has long been anointed the right sort of cricketer, a captain in waiting - an establishment-endorsed chap. He is expected to be, in a way Shane Warne never was, "a serious person". That's the real reason for all the gnashing of teeth and it's a lame one. Right sort of chap has wrong sort of girlfriend. And she's got him on a string.
I think I preferred it when we neither knew nor cared what sort of girlfriend cricketers had. But those days are gone and they aren't coming back. Can we at least stop pretending all of this is some sort of meaningful crisis?
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