Clarke out of Shield, Test status uncertain

Michael Clarke remains a chance to lead Australia into the first Test against India next month, although his opportunity to prove his fitness would now appear to hinge on a grade cricket appearance the weekend before that series opener in Brisbane.

Bupa Support Team Physiotherapist Alex Kountouris today ruled out Clarke from turning out for his club side Western Suburbs this weekend and for New South Wales in their Sheffield Shield match, which begins at the SCG on Tuesday and is the Blues’ last Shield outing before the opening Commonwealth Bank Test starting December 4.

Shortly after meeting with the Australian captain this morning to assess his hamstring injury and plot a rehabilitation path, Kountouris told reporters in Sydney that the complexity of Clarke’s latest setback meant an accurate time frame could not be fixed to his recovery.

Rather, the re-aggravation to an earlier injury at the top of his left leg near the hamstring tendon had prevented the 33-year-old from being able to undertake any running since he sustained it last Friday and he has been sidelined from competitive cricket until he is able to do so.

“He hasn't started running, he hasn't started doing any of the functional things that we want him to do, he’s not able to bat so he's not ready to play at the moment,” Kountouris said.

“His next (scheduled) game of cricket is a grade game on the weekend, and he's not available for that.

“There's a Shield game starting next Tuesday and he's not available for that.

“So that's as far as we're looking.

“We're still hopeful that he might be right for the first Test because that's two weeks away but we need to review it again next week.

“He needs to start running and start doing things before we make a decision on whether he's OK to play.”

Bupa Support Team Head Coach Darren Lehmann said earlier this week that if Clarke, who took 10 weeks to recover from a more serious injury to the same hamstring prior to the triangular series in Zimbabwe in August, was to be considered for the Test “he would have to play the Shield game” starting Tuesday.

But now that he’s been ruled out of that fixture, and with the squad for the start of the four-Test series against India to be named on Monday, the selectors will need to make a decision based on the probability of him recovering rather than how fit he looks on the field.

If he’s named in the squad and is required to perform at some competitive level before the Test XI is finalised, that opportunity might come on the second day of Western Suburbs’ match against Parramatta at Old Kings Oval on Saturday, November 29.

Before he is cleared to return to the playing field Clarke will undergo a closely monitored testing regimen to ensure he is replicating workloads his body would need to endure in a Test match, as was the case before he was passed fit to play in the recent Test series against Pakistan in the UAE.

“At the moment he hasn’t run once, so him going and playing tomorrow would be a massive risk,” Kountouris said in acknowledging that any athlete returning from the recurrence of a soft tissue injury was a chance to re-injure it upon returning to competition.

“But if he’s done 10 running sessions and 10 training sessions and done all the things that we mimic he’d do in a game – as much as possible – then that’s the best we can do.

“And we’ve got certain parameters that we can put on it – we know how fast he runs in a game so we can put a GPS unit on him to see how fast he’s running at training and we certainly did that in the UAE and he was running quite fast.

“And we waited 10 weeks before he came back (in the Pakistan series) so I would say he didn’t come back too early.

“We ticked all the right boxes to get him back playing in the UAE and he didn’t get injured there, he got injured playing back in Australia (in Friday’s opening Carlton Mid ODI Series match against South Africa in Perth).

“So we’ve got to get him back to those levels first and then say ‘OK, now we have to prepare him for playing a game’.

“And he’s going to have to play a game, whether it’s a grade game, a Shield game, a Test match or whatever it is – we’re going to have to play him in a game somewhere.”

Kountouris dismissed suggestions that the most recent re-aggravation of Clarke’s hamstring injury would sideline him for the remainder of the Australian summer.

He also confirmed that Clarke’s rehabilitation program would hopefully see him begin running “some time next week” and gave no indication the skipper was contemplating surgery to try and fix the problem even though the problem area is close to his hamstring tendon.

Australia pace bowler Nathan Coulter-Nile suffered a similar run of injuries to his left hamstring tendon last summer and underwent surgery in June which kept him out of the game for three months.

Kountouris said that even though Clarke’s injury was complicated by its proximity to the tendon – where recovery is invariably slower due to lower blood flows – it would eventually heal, though whether that came in time for the first Test remained unknown.

“If it was a new injury and we’d just seen it for the very first time we would say it was a very low-grade injury and we’d be looking at him playing in a couple of weeks, but it’s not,” he said.

“Maybe it makes no difference, maybe we’re jumping at shadows, we just don’t know.

“I’m hopeful he’ll be back for the first Test but we’re still a week away from even considering that.

“He (Clarke) thinks the Test is realistic but it’s not a sure thing.

“It's quite sore at the moment – he’s had an acute flare up of his back as well, which is complicating it.

“But there comes a point where there's no more healing to be done and waiting longer doesn't necessarily give you any more benefits.

“Unfortunately he could rest now for five months and come back and the first time he runs he could tear his hamstring again.

“And for someone like Michael the risks are that he's got a back injury that complicates things and puts a lot of pressure on his hamstrings.

“He's (also) an older athlete and we know that’s a risk factor, and the biggest risk factor for having a hamstring injury is having had one before.

“And he’s had multiple hamstring injuries on both legs so they are all risk factors that we're not going to get rid of – they're there permanently.

“What we can do is get his strength at the right level, make sure that he's running and running hard and running well and tick all those boxes, which we did in the UAE.”

The better news for the National Selection Panel, which will finalise the Test squad over the weekend, is that vice-captain and wicketkeeper Brad Haddin is making “pretty good” progress from the right shoulder injury he suffered in the UAE, according to Kountouris.

He said Haddin would undertake his first training session today since injuring the joint diving to take a catch and that he remained hopeful he would be available for NSW’s Bupa Sheffield Shield game starting on Tuesday in which he had the chance to prove his fitness for the first Test.