Australian captain Michael Clarke, left, and coach Mickey Arthur. IN the annals of athletes behaving badly, the suspension of four key cricketers from the Australian team for failing to submit ideas about improving team performance sets a new standard -- of what, it is as yet unclear. For those already disgruntled with the team's two crushing defeats in India, it represents another victory for the managerialism widely alleged to be the game's besetting sin in this country -- the "cricket is a simple game" school to which Shane Warne is perhaps the patron-in-chief. From the ranks of former Australian players with television soapboxes, journalistic amanuenses and Twitter accounts flowed a chorus of indignation about Shane Watson, Mitchell Johnson, Usman Khawaja and James Pattinson being belittled in such a way, treated like "schoolboys" in the words of Darren Lehmann, "under-6s" in the words of Mark Waugh. Yet it didn't fit this mould quite as well as originally appeared, given the identities of the three instigators: coach Mickey Arthur, manager Gavin Dovey and, above all, captain Michael Clarke. On Saturday, in its Top 50 series, The Weekend Australian deemed Clarke the most influential individual in Australian sport. Because it is hard to imagine Arthur and Dovey proceeding without Clarke's explicit say-so, it seems the captain has decided that influence is nothing if it is not exercised. After Arthur had fronted a press conference on Monday complaining about the players, Clarke laid out his position with painstaking emphasis in a 10-minute video on the Cricket Australia website. "I think the one thing I want the players to understand, and the thing I want the public to understand back home, is to represent Australia is a huge honour," Clarke explained. We owe the game a hell of a lot every time we walk out on to the field . . . not the other way around. The game owes us nothing. So if you are not going to adhere to the standards of the Australian cricket team, if you are not going to do everything in your power to help the team, to help yourself have success, especially when you are two-nil down in the series, then unfortunately there are consequences. That may be why Warne, recently so outspoken in his critiques of Australian cricket but a bosom pal of Clarke's, offered such a reticent and equivocal comment on his Facebook page. "Regarding the issue of four players being unavailable for Aust selection due to not delivering homework or a report to the coach, the answer is simple," wrote Warne. The captain runs the team and in conjunction with the selectors picks the team. The captain should always have final say. "Ridiculous what's happening," Warne concluded, and many agreed. The events have caused a predictable wave of hilarity in England, where Australia commences 10 consecutive Ashes Tests in July, in something that from afar looks very much like disarray. "What is going on with Aussie Cricket??" tweeted Michael Vaughan, the former England captain. Didn't realise you had to do an essay to get a selection these days !!!!! Yet it is not a year since England underwent something similar when its star batsman, Kevin Pietersen, indulged in a major sulk that included sending SMSs derogatory of his captain, Andrew Strauss, to former South African countrymen he was playing a series against. The decision by Strauss and his coach, Andy Flower, to cut Pietersen loose severely weakened England's team, contributing to its defeat in the series and the loss of its hard-won status as the world's No 1 Test nation. But when a remorseful Pietersen rejoined the team in India late last year, he blended back in with alacrity, and turned the Mumbai Test on its head with perhaps his finest innings -- an innings that savoured of a man proving a point. At this week's press conference, in fact, South African Arthur had recourse to the Pietersen example in explaining the new dogma of tough managerial love. What the episode seems to have brought into tightest focus, however, is the uneasy peace between captain Clarke and vice-captain Watson -- both 31 and near-exact cricket contemporaries, but the former having played 91 Tests with barely a stutter, and the latter 40, interrupted by injuries and form. In his first 18 months as captain, Clarke was able to draw not only on the prowess and sagacity of Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey but the support and abiding friendship of Brad Haddin, a long-time teammate with NSW who was his first vice-captain. It was when Haddin renounced his place in the West Indies for personal reasons last April and in doing so lost his preferment that Watson filled the breach as Clarke's deputy. But it has never looked a comfortable arrangement. Watson played his best cricket six months ago in the World Twenty20 in Clarke's absence; this summer in Australia he has come and gone with various indispositions, and a fluctuating status, indispensable one moment, irrelevant the next. An accord seemed to have been reached when Clarke bowled Watson heavily in the Test at Bellerive Oval in Tasmania, then when Clarke looked likely to have to stand down from the Boxing Day Test and leave Watson as his locum. In the event, Clarke played in Melbourne, made a century, and it was Watson who sustained another injury, afterwards looking distraught and complaining of having been over-bowled in Hobart. When Watson, after a month's convalescence, put himself forward as only a specialist batsman for the tour of India, Clarke pointedly commented that his vice-captain was not guaranteed selection: "As I've said to Watto, while he's not bowling he goes into a much bigger pool of players . . . the pool of batsmen is much bigger than the pool of all-rounders in Australian cricket at the moment." Relations do not appear to have improved. Although Watson's departure from the tour on Monday to be with his heavily pregnant wife, Lee Furlong, was prearranged, he has admitted that the trip will involve some soul-searching. "At this point in time I'm at a stage where I'm sort of weighing up my future and what I want to do with my cricket in general, to be honest," he told journalists in Mohali. It is likewise a coincidence, if not an altogether complete one, that the Australian team was joined yesterday by Haddin. He has been called up as cover for injured keeper Matthew Wade, but Clarke will welcome the presence of his durable old confrere. The "cricket is a simple game" thesis has also been complicated in the past five years by the advent of supranational T20, which has divided energies, loyalties and resources. Both Pietersen and Watson have been highly paid stars in the Indian Premier League. Before and during his estrangement from the England team, Pietersen noisily toyed with the idea of turning his back on international cricket in favour of throwing in his lot with the Delhi Daredevils and "the best tournament to play in as a player, bar none." "India buzzes for its players and that makes you feel special," said Pietersen. Everything is magnificent off the field. The owners are passionate. They have guys to sort out restaurants for the teams, you fly brilliantly from city to city. Nothing is too much hassle. While Watson has kept his own counsel, father Bob told The Courier-Mail: "Playing Test cricket for Australia is the ultimate thing . . . but if it comes down to it he is pretty good at Twenty20 cricket and the Indian Premier League. Questions arise. Have the spoils available outside the international game bred outsized senses of entitlement among certain players? And has the emergent T20 circuit in general, with its many colourful variants and scores of teams, weakened the idea of contributing to a team in a way beyond individual performance? What's this? The coach has asked me for an idea? Aren't I just here to execute my skill set? Where Watson will find no disagreement is in his remarks that the penalty of suspension from a Test match is "very harsh" -- really for anything. Two months ago in the Big Bash League, Warne entangled himself in a prolonged, puerile and entirely unnecessary confrontation with an opponent, Marlon Samuels, in front of tens of thousands of live spectators and hundreds of thousands of television viewers. Suspended for a single T20 match and levied a token fine, he then had the temerity to complain he was hard done by. In their public comments, Cricket Australia officers minimised the offence, deeming it good publicity for the tournament. Watson and his fellow miscreants would be entitled to wonder: how did we get from mild tut-tutting of players involved in boorish on-field confrontations to benching players from Test matches for an excess of casualness in addressing a management request? The answer, if they should choose to recognise it, is that it is about more than that -- not so much about additional indiscretions, to which CA's high-performance manager Pat Howard alluded perhaps a little too airily yesterday in a rather rambling press conference, but about additional expectations on the part of the leadership. Australia is setting out to rebuild a team that no longer has the services of such exemplars as Ponting and Hussey. The custodians of the former culture have departed; the creators of the future culture have been slow to step up; in that environment, apparently little things do take on additional dimensions. One of yesterday's most perceptive commenters was Khawaja's manager Daniel Zammit, who observed that cricket was out of step with other professional sports, especially football, which secured allegiance with heavy punishment of seemingly minor misdemeanours -- a sort of sporting equivalent of "broken windows" policing. "I dare a young rugby league player to say 'I forgot' (to do my homework)," Zammit told Sydney's 2GB radio. Hell and damnation would come down on their heads.The entire cricket universe is soft in the belly compared to other sports. Cricketers, he said, had always regarded themselves as "special" and "different" where discipline was concerned. The message of this episode is perhaps that such specialness and difference can no longer be taken for granted; it will have to be earned.