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“If I was given the option, even winning the Allan Border Medal, I wouldn’t have went (sic),” Clarke said on his radio show last year. “Because it’s never the end of season for us. With cricket, it’s a TV program, so everything on there is done for television.

“And then you’ve got media around the whole time, so you can’t unwind and drink because there will be a photo or a video and someone being pissed or under the weather, and then you’ve got to read about that the next day.”

In 2020, when made a Cricket NSW life member, Clarke declined to attend the state association’s AGM to accept the honour, instead doing so via Zoom.

Clarke’s era, where his ascension to the captaincy coincided with the Don Argus-led review of Australian team performance, pushed the national team to achieve the goals of being No.1 in the world in all formats at once, an aspiration that the late Rod Marsh was later to say created the preconditions for the 2018 Newlands scandal.

But for Clarke and numerous other players of distinction from the period - Shane Watson, Brad Haddin, Mitchell Johnson and Ryan Harris are all worthy of hall of fame consideration - there is the unmistakable sense that more might have been accomplished with better underpinnings than simply the pressure to win.

Certainly the current side, led by captain Pat Cummins and a cadre of senior players who grew up under Clarke, has a much more rounded view of the factors that contribute to success. A happier, more balanced group of cricketers can enjoy wins at home and away as a by-product of being well-prepared, thoughtful and considerate of others.

In that sense, they are not too far removed from the group of which Redpath was an integral figure, even as he missed numerous overseas tours in the latter part of his 66-Test match stint to spend time with his family. Winning, important though it was, arrived as a side effect of playing well and for each other.

What is left, years and decades later, is not merely the winning team photos and trophies but the shared memories of doing it all together. Both the players and the Australian cricket public remember that feeling much more easily than statistics.

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Clarke’s era, meanwhile, was punctuated by a few shining moments. There was the 2013-14 Ashes summer, a dramatic victory in South Africa a few weeks later, and the lifting of the 2015 50-over World Cup on home soil.

But the overseas record of his team was poor, soundly beaten twice in England and once in India, also being thrashed by Pakistan in the UAE. Victories away from home tend to be characterised by togetherness and shared purpose, a thread running through the road triumphs of teams led by Ian Chappell, Border, Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting and, last year in Pakistan, Pat Cummins.

At the same time, the current group know intrinsically that their legacy will be shaped not by individual records, of which they already have plenty of the handsome variety, but by shared triumphs away from home in India and England this year.

Without team garlands, it is harder to place what exactly those singular records actually mean to Australian cricket. Clarke’s exclusion thus far from the hall of fame serves as a signal reminder of that fact.