Warning bells for a future skipper

CRICKET star Michael Clarke's turbulent private life could cost him the captaincy.

IT was not just the prying eyes of the gossip hounds that remained fixed on a penthouse apartment in Bondi Beach last night, while Michael Clarke, the cricketer anointed the next captain of Australia, tried to resolve his future with a rather flaky swimwear model by the name of Lara Bingle.

The reality of the Pup'n'Bingle soap opera is that the group of men charged by Cricket Australia with choosing the national cricket team - and appointing its leaders - were every bit as fixated as the rest of the nation.

Like Tiger Woods taking an indefinite break from golf after his infidelities were revealed, when Clarke abandoned the tour of New Zealand mid-series to be with a partner still paying for her own indiscretions, he confirmed that he could no longer quarantine his chaotic personal life from the field of play. The relationship was threatening to derail both the performance of a key batsman at the crease and the vice-captain's leadership in the dressing room.

For cricket commentators, past players and relationship experts, this is a situation that cannot last.

It is likely that by this morning, behind the tinted windows of Clarke's $6 million apartment, a decision will have been made: the engagement will soldier on, or "Clarkey" will have asked for his keys back. Last night, the first reports of a breakup were surfacing on the TV news, and were denied by Clarke's manager Chris White.

Ian Chappell is one of several former cricketing greats to have expressed concern at Clarke's future as Test leader, despite the fact that the 28-year-old has long been considered the heir apparent to present captain Ricky Ponting.

"I understand that situations can come along where things need to be sorted out domestically but if I was a selector, it would be in the back of my mind. I'd be thinking, 'Well, if we have another candidate the equal to this Michael Clarke, he might be worth looking at'," says Chappell, who captained the Australian side in the 1970s.

"Stability and durability, to me, are very important factors in an Australian captain. They might not be right at the top of the list but they're right up there."

And at the moment they are qualities that could hardly be used to describe the life of a celebrity couple whose arguments and appearances are documented by the nation's media. Just last night Bingle's failure to wear her engagement ring was reported on the TV news.

And according to psychologists, if such chaos continues the gifted cricketer may not be able to claim stability and durability in his on-field performances either.

"In my view, off-field and personal issues are quite critical to the probability of an athlete achieving success on the field," says Jeff Bond, a leading sports psychologist who worked with the Australian Institute of Sport and more recently the Richmond AFL club.

"Not many athletes can divorce personal problems from their performance. It's not as easy as switching channels."

Bond cites three ways in which dramas such as Bingle's nude photo scandal might undermine sportsmen or sportswomen on game day.

Firstly, people have a finite capacity to absorb and cope with stress, Bond says.

As a result, off-field dramas add to an athlete's baseload of stress, meaning he or she has limited tolerance to cope with the additional pressure that will inevitably come during competition.

Secondly, research has shown there is a strong correlation between mood states and performance, so a low mood often leads to poorer results. And such personal issues also impede on an athlete's concentration.

So while "thought-stopping" techniques can be taught so that athletes "park" their personal issues, those issues will inevitably take a toll, Bond says.

Relationships expert Anne Hollonds agrees. A psychologist with Relationships Australia, Hollonds notes that while celebrities have to deal with the added hassle of the media spotlight when their relationships are strained, all couples - famous or otherwise - face the same fundamental issues.

"I think it's a myth that you can separate your personal life from your professional life, because they clearly impact on each other and I think that is widely understood these days," she says.

While not wanting to comment on the Clarke-Bingle matter, Hollonds says people in the public eye "have the same problems as everyone else, when it comes to managing complex personal issues and demanding work lives".

"It's not easy for any of us, trying to juggle our personal and professional lives. And of course, for the likes of Tiger Woods, being photographed when coming out of rehab, it makes things harder.

"But we are all human. It's not helpful to assume that we are robots who can 'switch on' when we're in our professional mode if things are not right in our personal lives. A lot depends on what kind of partnership you have in the first place . . . and the severity, degree and frequency of the problems. If you have a strong partnership, that helps in dealing with the ups and downs of life."

Of course, as Bond notes, if it's a big ask to expect an athlete to forget their issues and just focus on a game, there are also exceptions to this rule: exceptions such as

Clarke's former teammate Shane Warne, whose unrivalled ability to spin a cricket ball from leg to off was matched only by his appetite for women other than his wife.

On the eve of the 2005 Ashes series in England, Warne's marriage to Simone unravelled after British tabloids revealed at least two of his affairs, replete with details of his sexual performance (a "stallion", apparently) and the location of some of the liaisons (the bonnet of his BMW).

But after announcing his separation in a press release, Warne went on to bag 40 wickets in the Test series. And it was a young Michael "Pup" Clarke whom the legspinner turned to during that northern summer for friendship and support.

But if the legend of Shane Keith Warne only grew, his captaincy prospects all but disappeared. Australia's second-greatest cricketer after Don Bradman, and arguably our most astute cricket brain, Warne would never claim the (c) after his name in a Test.

While Cricket Australia never said as much, it was known that the sport's powerbrokers ruled a line through the captaincy prospects of Warne as scandal after scandal engulfed the legspinner.

Put simply, the office of Australian Test captain has always demanded a certain personality type: forthright, dependable, and certainly not one who is likely to attract off-field headlines for the wrong reasons.

And this goes to the heart of Clarke's professional problem.

His issues, as private as they are, are being played out in public.

So while the likes of teammate Mitchell Johnson can endure tabloid reports that his mother had declared she was no fan of his lads' mag model and karate champ girlfriend Jessica Bratich, the media storm surrounding Clarke and Bingle is on another scale.

It is a storm that has been raging ever since the Sydney Test of January 2009, when it was revealed that teammate Simon Katich had grabbed Clarke by the throat at the end of the game. The batsman had asked Katich if the team song could be sung earlier than usual because he wanted to leave the clubrooms to be with Bingle.

The present imbroglio can actually be charted back even further, to 2006, when Bingle in her pre-Clarke days had an affair with a married AFL footballer, Brendan Fevola. It later emerged that Fevola had taken a photo of her naked on his phone, against her will, and then allegedly circulated the photo to friends.

In a paid interview with Woman's Day magazine this week - the same publication that first published the photo - the 22-year-old model spoke of feeling "violated" by Fevola.

And a day later, amid the fall-out from her interview, she summoned her fiance home from the tour of New Zealand.

If Clarke can take any comfort from the experiences of others, it can perhaps be found in the travails of the present captain, Ricky Ponting.

Eleven years ago, Ponting, then a precocious talent but not yet a great, was involved in a drunken scuffle in Sydney's Kings Cross that left him with a black eye, a bruised ego and a three-match ban from the limited-overs team. Always touted as a future leader, he was suddenly tarnished and a promotion to the captaincy could scarcely have been imagined.

But rather than cruelling his chances of ever assuming the highest office in Australian sport, Ponting's indiscretion actually marked the turning point in his life. He confessed to an alcohol problem, cleaned up his private life, and can now claimed to have won more Tests than any other captain in the game's history.

The question now is whether Clarke can do the same; whether his love for Bingle outweighs the angst their relationship is causing him and the team.

It is clearly no easy decision, but his captain - if not the media - is giving him time to make it.

"I haven't heard from him today and don't really expect to," Ponting said yesterday in New Zealand.

"He knows, from all of us within the team, that he has our support. The last thing I said to him before he left was just to take as much time as he needed."