Obviously there is a lot more to captaincy than merely turning in a solid individual performance.

Just ask Michael Clarke, who’s spent much of the past few months defending the culture of the Australian team, hosing down spats between himself and former teammates, talking up his team’s chances in the forthcoming home Ashes series and lobbing psychological grenades at the English, before strolling out onto the Gabba and getting dismissed for a solitary run after attempting to fend off a short Broad ball.

It’s ever thus, I suppose: the best laid plans and the most meticulous preparations undone by a single lapse of concentration, that always seems to come in the harsh glare of the public spotlight.

The interminable buildup to a four-yearly fixed-term election certainly gives the political captains plenty of time to ruminate, to talk of what might be and to dream of what might transpire. And, of course, plenty of opportunities to stride to the political crease and completely fluff everything up.

Evidently the pressure all became too much for Steven Marshall who, despite his personal profile remaining his biggest political impediment (ie no-one knows who he is), decided he’d be best served in one of the few remaining weeks left to him to campaign to visit one of the state election’s most hotly-contested locales — South-East Asia. That’s right, he jumped on a plane and disappeared for a week to drum up support in Malaysia and Indonesia, where no-one can vote for him.

Ironically, authorities decided the best way to symbolise this renewal was to find an ancient band of cadavers and pay them a princely sum to perform at the rejuvenated Adelaide Oval.

We’ll be generous and assume it was merely coincidence that this trip seems to have coincided with among Australia’s worst weeks of Indonesian diplomacy since the INTERFET was dispatched to East Timor. Moreover, without actually garnering any coverage for his trip (which he kept under wraps beforehand because, after all, nothing incites a media frenzy like the Leader of the Opposition of Australia’s fifth most populous state flying into town for a few meetings), he still managed to turn it into a domestic controversy, implying that he’d like to see local manufacturing shifted to low-cost Asian hubs. Still, there is a plus – after a week away, it’s entirely possible that more people know who Steven Marshall is in Indonesia and Malaysia than they do in Adelaide. And, as a bonus, no-one burned any SA emblems outside the Australian embassy as a result of his manufacturing gaffe, so he’s one-up on Tony Abbott.

Seriously though, no matter how earnestly you take diplomatic relations nor how vital you consider trade in our region, surely these trips are better left for once you’ve actually won Government, and certainly not in the final four months of a four year campaign, half of which you’ve spent on the backbench. Last week an Advertiser Galaxy poll of 860 respondents confirmed the Liberals were in an election-winning position, and even had Marshall himself on the cusp of overtaking Weatherill in the much-talked-about-but-really-not-very-important preferred premier ledger. They even managed to find the only 860 people in all of SA who had heard of a Liberal economic plan, and most of them even rated it as superior to Labor’s. So naturally the best way to seize on the momentum from all this positive polling is to skip town for the ensuing week.

Fortunately for Marshall, while he continues to fiddle, Rome continues to burn. Labor’s much vaunted cranes – not mere construction tools but the index by which the Government measures the state’s entire economic wellbeing – appear hellbent on destruction, seemingly dropping loads and keeling into one another at every opportunity, which does somewhat take the sheen off the one unambiguous message the ALP continues to peddle with some authority, that infrastructure renewal continues apace.

Ironically, authorities decided the best way to symbolise this renewal was to find an ancient band of cadavers and pay them a princely sum to perform at the rejuvenated Adelaide Oval. Sadly, Time is no longer on the Rolling Stones’ Side, and while once upon a time keeping the band together and cognisant for a big performance was every promoter’s nightmare, now merely keeping them all alive for March could prove a formidable challenge.

The concert will mark a week since the state election, so the band could yet outlive the Weatherill Government or (less likely) Steven Marshall’s leadership. After all, neither Premier nor Opposition Leader have wended their inextricable way into the electorate’s collective psyche.

They’ve been busy, sure, holding their respective parties together, holding tenuous voting blocs together and cobbling revenue-neutral policies together. But the thing about leadership is after all the team things, we still need to see the dazzling individual performance.

Hopefully we’ll see some semblance from both Weatherill and Marshall in the campaign proper. But even so, once you’re all padded up and prodding at the pitch, you never know when the short ball is going to catch you unawares and send you trudging back to the change-room. That’s the thing about politics. Sometimes it’s just not cricket.

Tom Richardson is InDaily’s political commentator and Channel Nine’s state political reporter.