Kevin Pietersen-ECB controversy: Ricky Ponting confirms Pietersen’s accusations on England bowlers

Oct 8, 2014

Veteran Australian batsman, Ricky Ponting confirmed the credibility of Kevin Pietersen’s claims about senior bowlers yelling at fielders who drop catches by saying he had witnessed it firsthand more than once.

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“We saw them doing it, [James] Anderson was always the same, and [Graeme] Swann. The pointing of fingers and you’d hear a few expletives if there was a misfield or a dropped catch. The guys who were doing it were the so-called leaders. That’s where the captain has got to come in, not wait and let little things turn into big things. That’s what it sounds like has happened in this England team. No one means to drop a catch, no one means to bowl a bad ball, no one means to play a bad shot. It just happens in a game and you have to accept it and move on.”, he was quoted as saying by The Daily Telegraph.

“They had lot of very good players that were able to achieve a lot of success as a team. But if you could just get inside of them and start pulling them apart, we always had a feeling they would implode pretty quickly and that’s what’s happened over the past 12 months. I wasn’t surprised with Trott [leaving the Ashes tour], I wasn’t surprised with Swann retiring when he did when the ship started to go down, he jumped off pretty quickly, and now all the Pietersen stuff,” he added.

More from Kevin Pietersen’s autobiography here