This week may be the last time we see Ricky Ponting wearing the baggy green cap of his beloved Australian Test team when they face South Africa in the second and final Test. Will the player all Englishmen love to hate end the tour (and possibly his Test career) on a high?
There are some great players who go into history, without really deserving it, for all the wrong reasons. A couple of significant downs somehow ruin all the ups of their magnificent career. Sadly Ricky Ponting looks like becoming one of them.
It shouldn’t happen. He’s played 154 Tests and scored nearly 12,500 runs. He was captain of Australia during the period when they dominated the world. And yet somehow he’ll always be remembered as the skipper who lost the Ashes in England not once but twice, and then – even worse – lost them again back on home soil.
His abrasive attitude made him a man English fans loved to see fail. The more he spat his dummy out when things went against him, the greater the delight. The YouTube clip of him getting run out by substitute Gary Pratt at Trent Bridge in 2005 has got nearly 200,000 hits, and the same number have watched (and probably re-watched Freddie Flintoff throwing his wicket down four years later too)!
And yet . . . plenty of people would also love to see ‘Punter’ make some runs when Australia play South Africa in the second Test on Thursday. Because it looks like whatever happens, it will be curtains for his Test career afterwards, and a great player should go out with a bang and not a whimper.
Ponting made eight and nought in the first Test, each time a victim to Vernon Philander, whose 8-78 gave him the best figures by a debutant in the 20 years since South Africa returned to Test cricket. The former skipper has a Test average of just 18.84 since the start of the last Ashes series, and has not scored a century since making 209 against Pakistan in Hobart in January 2009.
Back home even respected, old-school commentators like Richie Benaud are saying that he’s reaching the end of the road: “Ricky’s situation is that the new chairman might have to tell him: ‘Listen it might be time to put the cue in the rack’. You don’t want to see a bloke with his record force the selectors to drop him.”
Ponting won’t want that either, and that’s why we could see the very best of him this week. Newlands might have been a wild pitch that saw 23 wickets fall in a day, but the Wanderers Ground where the second Test takes place is normally much more of a batting strip.
And, after the humiliation of getting skittled out for just 47, you can expect Ponting and current skipper Michael Clarke, to demand better batting standards.
All of which makes backing Australia at 3.6 to get the win that would level this very short series tempting. At 36 there should be a few years left in Ponting’s time at the top, but if he’s got to go it would be fitting if he does it with one final flourish. He’s 4.8 to top-score for Australia in the first innings.
