Ricky Ponting breaks free from his cricketing pallbearers to stuns the world
From the depths of despair after that duck at The Wanderers, Ponting now has 658 runs at 73-plus and looked something close to his best against India at Adelaide © Getty Images
By David Green
When we asked a few months ago if Ricky Ponting had lost his punch, despite being English we did so with a heavy heart, given that we always had a strange and inexplicable affection for him.
At the time of writing, Ponting had performed poorly at Cape Town in the Test that Australia were infamously dismissed for just 47.
The axe was hovering as Ponting’s dismal run reached what appeared to be its climatic moment. He had scored only one hundred in his previous 23 Tests. His average during this run was just 33.78. That slipped further to 26.50 in the 13 matches since that solitary hundred in Hobart against Pakistan and to a dismal 18.84 since the start of the 2010-11 Ashes. In short, he looked finished.
When he registered a duck in his next Test innings in Johannesburg, the game looked up. Australia’s best batsman since Don Bradman was surely playing his last Test. His form and technique seemed to have completely eluded him.
But Ponting is nothing if not determined and a resilient 62 in the second innings at The Wanderers helped carry Australia to an improbable victory to draw the series. He had survived the selectors guillotine. Just.
And with India’s bowlers proving the most willing of accomplices, Ponting has shoved the words of the critics back down their throats with his 40th and 41st Test hundreds. He has also scored another three fifties since his partial redemption in Johannesburg.
From the depths of despair after that duck at The Wanderers, Ponting now has 658 runs at 73-plus and looked something close to his best against India at Adelaide.
Never has the old adage of form being temporary and class being permanent held truer than in the case of Ponting, who lest it not be forgotten now has over 13,000 Test runs to his name.
Ponting may have proved our words false, but for once we are glad as such a batting champion deserved an epitaph better than the ones hastily written after the debacle in Cape Town.
(David Green is the brain behind the irreverent The Reverse Sweep blog and also writes for number of cricket publications and sites such as World Cricket Watch. You can follow him on Twitter also @TheReverseSweep. David was a decent schoolboy and club cricketer (and scored his maiden 100 the same week that Sachin Tendulkar scored his first Test ton) but not good enough to fulfill his childhood dream of emulating Douglas Jardine by winning the Ashes in Australia and annoying the locals into the bargain. He now lives with his wife and two young children in the South of France and will one day write the definitive biography of Hedley Verity)