Whitewash to Whitewash: Australian Cricket's Years of Struggle and Summer of Riches by Brettig Daniel

Author:Brettig, Daniel [Brettig, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857978912
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-02-24T22:00:00+00:00

On the night of the India match, Ponting barely slept. The thought kept recurring that his time as captain was over. The World Cup campaign had been poor, his own career was winding down and it was now more than two years away from the next Ashes series and four from the World Cup. He was resigned to the fact the team needed fresh direction, having seen the abysmal failure of his ‘best I can be’ example during the Ashes. That approach had not only loaded up pressure on Ponting, but had also left other members of the team feeling that if their captain failed, they had little chance of beating England. When the campaign for the urn fell utterly to pieces, on either side of the freakish result in Perth, much of Ponting’s pre-series rhetoric was made to look awfully hollow, and his on-field leadership equal parts stubborn and sullen.

As a captain, Ponting’s need to make runs increased the longer he continued, because his team was in decline. But that decline and the cycle of players into and out of the team also had a debilitating effect on his batting, because he had fewer hours in which to hone it. In some recent matches, such as in Johannesburg and Headingley in 2009, Ponting had still been able to produce innings redolent of his best. But the supply had become sporadic before cutting out altogether during the Ashes. The day before the critical second Test of the series, in Adelaide, Ponting had spent as much time advising Clarke on his technique as he had working on his own. Both were out cheaply the next morning.

Ponting was not prepared to move from his signature number three spot in the batting order while captain, nor to compromise on the aggressive style of play, winning the game off his own bat, that had made his reputation as the best batsman of Australia’s dominant era. As a young member of the Australian squad in the 1990s, Ponting had felt that Steve Waugh should have batted at number three because he was the team’s best batsman, and after his own retirement he was equally convinced that Clarke should be batting there. This view did not change.

Similarly rigid was Ponting’s tactical view of the game. It is true that he had the odd excellent match or series as an on-field ringmaster, most notably in South Africa in 2009. Like Allan Border, he had become adept at ODI leadership, helped by his ability to station himself in the fielding circle and prowl for run-outs. But overall there was a methodical, plodding element to Ponting’s captaincy that often had bowlers summoned at mechanical intervals of five or six overs. Former Australian captain Ian Chappell believes that Ponting’s greatest area of weakness was an inability to take enough of his gambler’s instinct onto the field, despite his ubiquitous nickname ‘Punter’ and well-known love of racing greyhounds.

This played out most often with spinners, a class of cricketer with whom Ponting always struggled to find sufficient common ground.

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