Where's the love for Clarke?

When a cricketer retires with a very good personal record and a powerful CV as captain of his country, you expect the obsequies to be dominated by respect. There may be a few buts and howevers and in-spite-ofs, but respect will be the dominant mood.

So what has Michael Clarke done wrong? His retirement has not been a succession of praise: it has been interrupted by reminders that a good many people have reservations about him. Why so? Clarke has a Test average of nearly 50; he has done a rare thing and scored more hundreds than fifties - 28 plays 27, a stunning conversion rate; he led Australia to victory in the last World Cup and to a 5-0 Ashes whitewash.

What the hell's wrong with that?

It puzzled me until I remembered two classic vignettes of Australian life. The first was a parody; the second - perhaps more absurd - is self-parody. The first is the philosophy department of the University of Woolamaloo (sic); the second is the Channel Nine commentary box.

The first of these is a Monty Python sketch, in which everyone is called Bruce, everyone drinks cans of beer all the time, and rules one, three, five and seven are "No poofters". The second is less subtle.

The Channel Nine comm box features ex-players, nicknames, old jokes, memories of glory days, phwoar, wow, giggle-giggle, he's a really great guy, yes and so's he, look at that, unbelievable, he really creamed that one. The team was memorably described in the Guardian as "the matiest mates that ever mated".

Clarke had a brief pre-retirement gig in this atmosphere. He made a serious error and tried to talk about the cricket. They ignored him. He'd got the tone wrong. He should have been matey, not intelligent.

He's been getting the tone wrong all his cricketing life. He's not interested in the traditional Aussie notion of mateship: the sort of thing caricatured by Monty Python and Channel 9 as a homocentric homophobic clique of blokes that thinks sheilas are a waste of time except for you know what.

Australia is changing even as you look at it but some Australians think their cricketers should maintain the ancient traditions: gum-chewing, bristle-jawed, one-for-all matiness with nothing stuck-up about them whatsoever, and rules one, three, five and seven never broken.

So Clarke was wrong from the start when he turned up with blond tips frosted onto his hair and wore a diamond earring. In 2010, he left a tour of New Zealand to see his then fiancée about a relationship problem. He made an emotional issue - with a woman, of all things - a priority over cricket. Unforgivable. Even though he got back in time for the first Test and scored a century.

Then there was the famous occasion when he left the dressing room before the singing of the victory song after a match against South Africa. You're supposed to put such beer-shampooing, hairy-hugging feasts of self-congratulation above all other pleasures in life, but Clarke wanted to leave. To see a woman, probably.

An argument broke out, escalating into physical confrontation with Simon Katich and Clarke left anyway. Matthew Hayden, the former Australian opener summed up: "He learned from that. He became a much better person and a much better player through those lessons."

In other words, Clarke learned how to dissemble, though he was never master of the art. John Buchanan, the former coach of Australia, said that Clarke let down the culture of the baggy green cap: "He didn't understand and he didn't want to understand." There was always a feeling in the air that Clarke found exaggerated displays of mateship and patriotism just a little embarrassing. Perhaps that's why he preferred a broad-brimmed sun hat.

The criticism largely comes back to Clarke's diffidence about mateship. Andrew Symonds said he was "not a natural leader". Symonds, dropped for missing practice to go fishing, is of the type who believes that there are two sorts of people in the world: people like me and people who are wrong.

The former captain Steve Waugh made the damn cap something close to a religious relic. For Clarke this was all frightfully last century. He objected to this kind of conformity, partly because he was an individualist with a need to stand out from the crowd, and partly because so far as he was concerned it was the wrong kind of conformity.

The backlash to the criticism has been almost as remarkable as the criticism. His team-mates on the current tour have been queuing up to support him, and not in a mealy-mouthed, go-through-the-motions way either. The current Australia coach Darren Lehmann has been the same.

Other ex-players have stood up for him, notably Shane Warne, who's genuinely furious. Warne was also an individualist in a team game, and he can also see beyond mateship.

Recently Clarke was required to stand up for a team-mate before all Australia and the cricketing world. He embraced the task and did it to perfection. After the death of Philip Hughes he managed to say the right thing in the right fashion at every opportunity, allowing a nation to mourn in precisely the right way.

The attitude to Clarke is all mixed up with the fact that wives, girlfriends and children have been part of the tour. Some blame this for Australia's failure, and blame Clarke for allowing it. In other words, the criticism of Clarke is at base anti-family. It's about the segregation of men and women: the belief that women should have nothing to do with serious matters. Like cricket. And mateship. Clarke, a man who loves the company of women, has always been at odds with this, and that's why this unreconstructed Ocker tendency has sought to do him down at the last.

It's all part of the baggage of Australia and Australian sport. The Clarke Affair is actually a battle between the past and the future of Australian life. Here at least, Clarke finds himself on the winning side.