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Cape Town – Nought out of six ... that is the completed record luckless Australian captain Michael Clarke will take home with him in terms of tosses in all matches he has played in on the South African tour.
“I knew I’d lose it anyway,” he said as defiantly as he could, after duly surrendering another attractive one at the start of the key second and final Test at the Wanderers on Thursday and seeing Graeme Smith opt to bat on what was described by television experts as a likely first-innings belter in the Highveld heat.
“It’ll be nice to see if the bowlers can exploit a bit of early moisture in it,” he added, perhaps just a little optimistically.
Clarke’s “duck” in tosses on our soil includes both Tests, all three one-day internationals (although the Aussies still won that portion of the visit 2-1) and even the match against SA ‘A’ in Potchefstroom, where Alviro Petersen won it and dubiously decided to take first strike on the spicy pitch – the local outfit were bundled out for 183 in their first knock.
The Aussie captain has now lost nine tosses in all formats on the trot, including four in succession in Tests: in receding order, at Wanderers, Newlands, Colombo and Pallekele.
Cameron White did stave off a nightmarish clean sweep of lost tosses for the Australian tour by winning one of the two Twenty20 international ones against Hashim Amla – at the Wanderers, to make the full Aussie tour tally one miserly success from eight.
Clarke, of course, did not play in the T20 internationals.
