Now that the laughter's died down over the desperate ‘Nobody loves Michael Clarke' affair (‘Changing room rumour has it that even Lara Bingle preferred Marcus North'....) perhaps some historical perspective is in order.

The idea that because Clarke is not the number-one hero of every Australian player then he won't be the next captain rests on assumptions that are not and never have been correct.

One: that Clarke and North will even be in the team when Ricky Ponting exits the job. Two: that a couple of veiled snipes mean Clarke's ‘popularity', whatever and if ever it was, is ‘waning'. Three: that dressing room popularity has ever been a factor in choosing a cricket captain. And four: that there is such a position as ‘heir apparent'.

Now, slowly, because the sharpness of Australian cricket discourse seems to have taken a parallel path to the performance of the national team, to take each in turn.

One. The Australian captaincy will fall vacant when Ricky Ponting is either dropped or chooses not to lead. Ponting has had his critics as a captain, and if this summer he becomes the first captain, after Billy Murdoch, to lose three Test series to England, he may well jump or be pushed. Or he may hang on to equal Murdoch's record of four.

But if things are that bad by the end of this summer, Clarke's or North's positions in the team are by no means certain. North, many argue, should not be in playing in the first Test, let alone all five. Clarke has many more runs in the bank than North, but after his poor return in India Clarke probably has three Tests' grace to restore himself. It's quite possible that if Australia's Ashes series goes so badly that Ponting would step down as captain, there would simply be no viable replacement and Ponting would be compelled to continue until there was.

Two. Clarke has never been the pin-up boy of his contemporaries, so to say his popularity is waning is to misunderstand the dynamic of this or any other team. As a youngster, Clarke was taken under Shane Warne's wing and was liked by his seniors. But it's always been the case that older generations criticise the younger, particularly when the kids are better paid for fewer achievements. Justin Langer, Andrew Symonds and Matthew Hayden are among those to have had a chip at Clarke's ‘lifestyle' but, apart from Symonds, who reportedly clashed with Clarke over the relationship with Bingle, those criticisms haven't had a personal edge. More personal has been the NSW-based friction between Simon Katich and Clarke, with Brad Haddin in the mix. These tensions exist in most cricket teams and pretty much all national ones; they are part of the competitive nature of the individuals. Some of Australia's most successful captains, including Richie Benaud, Lindsay Hassett, Bob Simpson, Bill Lawry and Greg Chappell, were by no means unanimous winners of their teams' popularity votes prior to becoming captain. Don Bradman was not fully accepted as Australian captain until after World War Two, when his team were young enough to be his children. Before the war, playing among his contemporaries, he was neither a popular nor highly respected captain among a sizeable faction of the Australian team.

Three. Popularity, or love and harmony, are figments of outsiders' imagination. Even in the most harmonious Australian team of recent times, the captain, Steve Waugh, was regarded as the best imaginable captain by several of his players, and yet his greatest bowler, Shane Warne, regarded him as the worst he played under. Correction: the one captain Warne rated below Waugh was Adam Gilchrist, who also led Australia in Waugh's and later Ponting's absence. Warne, of course, had a motive - sour grapes - but that only reinforces the point. Rarely if ever is a cricket team fully harmonious. Several of the great West Indian players of the 1980s and 1990s would not even talk to each other, and some loathed Viv Richards when he was captain. But as with the Australian team in its pomp, victory was the panacea. In victory, all personal rivalries were buried. It's only when a team starts losing that the rivalries come to the surface. That's what we're seeing now: not a sudden change in Clarke's standing, but a sudden scrutiny of old feelings, exaggerated by the neon light of defeat.

Four. As for the idea of an ‘heir apparent', Clarke has been the first to brush that off. It's not his fault that he's vice-captain. In the Allan Border years, the vice-captaincy was a tombstone, not a stepping-stone. Before (and even, briefly, including) Mark Taylor, every one of Border's vice-captains was dropped from the team. It's another thing that happens in the losing part of the cycle. It would have been ridiculous to suggest that any of those men under Border was his ‘heir apparent'. As ridiculous as it is now. When a team's on the downswing, every man is fighting for his place. Including the captain and his deputy.