As Ricky Ponting looks on at Sydney, his little finger throbbing and frustration welling up inside him, he will inevitably wonder if his illustrious test career finished in the wreckage and tantrums of Melbourne. If that is the case then it certainly won’t be the finish that he would have scripted for himself, nor would it be a fitting end to an illustrious career.
The wisdom among pundits is that he shouldn’t remain as captain but that he still has a good deal to offer as a batsman. Those Australian players who have ventured an opinion seem to suggest that they still consider him to be their leader and, in Michael Clarke’s words, a ‘champion player’. Sadly for all, that is no longer the case.
One of the great challenges for selection committees is when to let a great player go. A tradition seems to have arisen over the last few years for allowing players to go on until they say that they have had enough in the hope that they might recapture past glories: Matthew Hayden is a recent example of a player who went on for a year or so too long but was considered undroppable by selectors even when his batting resembled a parody of its former power. England have done the same: the most obvious example is Ian Botham, who kept being selected in hope rather than expectation. Too often sentiment has been allowed to stand in the way of progress and there is a real risk that this will happen in the case of Ponting, that he will be allowed another series to enable him to go out on the crest of the wave rather than in the embarrassment of recent days.
The problem is that, for all of the talk and expectation, his form in the Ashes shouldn’t be a great surprise to anyone who has been watching him of late. In sixteen tests since the last Ashes he has scored just over a thousand runs at 36.35. These are respectable figures, but are inflated by his 209 at Hobart against Pakistan, his only hundred in the period. Had he been caught on nought in that innings, as he should have been, then his average would have dropped below thirty. It’s also worth pointing out that ten of those tests have been against Pakistan, the West Indies and New Zealand who, without wanting to be rude, aren’t the most challenging opponents in world cricket at the moment.
All batsmen have bad trots, of course, but what should be of most concern has been the manner of his dismissals. It feels as though almost all of his innings in this series have ended with him prodding outside off stump, his feet trapped on the crease. At his best, Ricky Ponting’s footwork has been among the best in the world, but now his movements are tentative. Equally, his once withering pull shot has become little more than a reflex paddle, an invitation to fine leg or deep backward square. With his fielding also becoming mortal, all of the indications are that his eyes have gone slightly, that he isn’t picking the ball up quite as early as once he did and so all of his movements are just a fraction too late. That isn’t something that can be rectified, it isn’t a matter of form, it is something that signals the end of a career.
There is also the fact that Australia have to move on – they have to look forward to what they can achieve with the players that they have and the players that are coming through. The glory days are gone and so they need new leadership and new players stepping up. It may well be a painful process, but it is something that happens to all great sides eventually. They will be better served with a new captain and a new set of players who have the freedom to make their mark on the game, rather than living up to the expectations of the old. Quite who that captain should be is a matter of conjecture, but they have to move on and that means an Australia without Ricky Ponting.
The one hope that I think that all cricket fans, whatever their persuasion, share is that history judges him on his whole career, not on its rather messy end, for he has been a truly great cricketer, one of those that I will be privileged to tell my grandchildren that I have seen play.
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