Life Under The Pump

In that cheesy, sobby, magnificent old movie The Shawshank Redemption, there's a scene in which Morgan Freeman's character, world-weary, repentant killer Red, finally understands the protagonist Andy's love of rock-polishing. 'Geology's like everything,' he says in that celestial voice, 'it's just pressure and time'.

Whether Sachin makes that 100th hundred on Saturday, or if Murali takes a wicket with his last ball [or whether there's a real Hollywood ending, and both things happen], the CWC 2011 has been all about pressure and time.

Geoffrey Boycott was lambasted for his comments on the withdrawal of England's Michael Yardy with depression. The condemnation was merited if self-righteous, but Boycott, who was offering an opinion on radio immediately after hearing the news, was clumsy rather than thoughtless. Indeed, he went through something similar himself after the death of his mother and his sacking by Yorkshire, which made his thoughts worthy of further examination. His initial reaction was to look to Yardy's on-field performances as a cause. That's inevitable, given Boycott's own obsessive personality, but it doesn't make the point entirely invalid. Humans are humans, and it is always a difficult moment when one comes up against the limits of their ability, especially when that ability has done so much to define their self-image.

What's more fascinating is whether a team can have a collective psyche, and if so, whether that psyche can dominate the individual within it. How else do you explain South Africa? And how do they explain themselves? The application of pressure made the unit fold again. Can something as intangible as the past really play a part?

Time has proved one of the best defences against pressure, or at least experience has, and experience is really time by another name. In different ways, Ricky Ponting and Sachin Tendulkar have resisted it. Experience gives you options, offers perspective. They have provided the most enduring memories of the tournament - fitting given the time and pressure they've embraced and withstood.

Ricky Ponting And The Ides Of March

Australia, or at least the Australian press, seem to be the only ones who don't think the side has a shot against India tomorrow. The obituaries are already old news, written when the quarter-final line-up became apparent; the story has already moved on to when and how Ricky Ponting will be sacked.

Conspiracies abound, the Ides of March are here. Ricky has been knifed, it's just not entirely clear by who. Was it the anonymous Cricket Australia drone who briefed against him at the press conference? Was it the survey that said cricket in Oz needs to reconnect with the younger fans? Perhaps it was the tattooed, metrosexual Brutus himself, Michael Clarke, who Ponting 'privately believes' has been undermining him?

It's odd to see them this way, stabbing each other in the back - not least because in Australia there are plenty of people willing to stab you in the front first. The blowhards had their say on Ponting after the Ashes. Here is something altogether more sinister, less straight-up, less Australian.

For so long, Australia's strength has been its strength, its sense of common purpose. Every player, however great - and there are plenty of those - bowed to overall goals of the team. Now, there is no great team and just one great player, and look what is happening to him.

India are exactly the sort of side Australia used to relish destroying, a team seeking dominance that could nonetheless be dominated by imposition of will. Mental disintegration they called it. Now things are disintegrating around Australia. They are even questioning the long-cherished, no-quarter tenets of their game, comparing Ponting's refusal to walk unfavourably with Tendulkar's decision to. When you cop it for not walking in Australia, the dogs are at the door.

Australia are crumbling from the outside in. One thing that's certain about Ponting is, he won't crumble himself.

Like the old saying goes, sometimes you don't know what you got till it's gone.

Addendum: Reading the above back, I suppose the point I'm lumbering towards is not that Australia's captain may change - that's a judgement call that can be fairly made either way - it's that the culture around the team has changed, and not for the better. Border, Taylor and Waugh departed with varying degrees of 'encouragement', but the culture around Australian cricket remained, and the successor on each occasion was a man of substance. None of those certainties exist now.

Ricky: Don't Lose His Number

As entertaining as it's been to watch Australia - or more accurately Australia's press - react to the obviously irredeemable situation of being one down with three to play, there's surely a place for a more measured view. The vilification of Ponting has been an embarrassment to them. If anyone is genuinely of the opinion that - for example - Mike Brearley could have affected a different result at Adelaide with the resources at Australia's disposal, then they simply don't know the game. England played as well as they have since 2005, and back then they beat the Australia of legend. Confronted with bowlers who couldn't keep to one side of the wicket, let alone build pressure through a period of overs, the Punter was screwed, hoist by his own petard.

He is a decent man and a proud cricketer, one of the greats. He demands respect, from both the English crowd [thankfully there is apparently now an insurrection on the matter of booing him to the crease] and from the writers who have spent half of their careers feting him, and who owe much of the space they get in the paper to the success of the teams that he's played in. He has grown up in public, and he is a credit to the sport in that regard. He is a fearsome opponent, the first name that Strauss and Flower would scratch from Australia's team sheet if they were given the choice. Imagine what a rabble they would be without him.

It's a very English trait to admire someone more once they're gone. You'll rarely read a bad word about Mike Atherton, Alec Stewart or Nasser Hussain any more, such is the afterglow of memory. It's seductive, that kind of nostalgia. It's easy to feel it already in the talk of replacing him.

The harder question is this: who do Australia have who's better? Michael Clarke? Marcus North? Cameron White? Shane Warne? Ponting's fire still burns, despite the forces ranged against him. As an Englishman who has lived through the bad old days, here's one piece of advice: be careful what you wish for.

Brightness falls

It always happens, and I always feel this way. There's something about the last days of great players, something noble, something ineffably sad that makes them seem greater than they were at their best.

India beat Australia [you may have heard], Tendulkar beat Ponting, Sachin beat Ricky, the Little Master bested the Punter, and it was magnetic, hypnotic cricket. The stats were too beautiful: Cheteshwa Pujara was one when Sachin first batted for India, which means he was a veteran of seven when Ricky first took block in a Test, and not yet born when Australia last lost three in a row [not even Ricky was playing when that happened 'although it feels like I was,' he said ruefully the other day].

What a tale Pujara can tell. At the crease with Sachin [who told him that the nerves would pass, so he should not fight them but feel them], in the field as Ponting raged against the dying of the light, both his own and his country's.

The state of Tendulkar's bat told its own tale - it was a reflection of him, thick-set and broad, well-used but still mighty. What craft there was to his batting, what skill and know-how, and what inevitability. No-one has deserved a swansong more.

While Ponting was a component of the great Australian machine, his batting, though merciless, seemed to lack the aesthetics of his peers, but now, as he fades, the beauty is manifest. In a country where he has barely averaged 30, he made three 70s against his nemesis Harbhajan. His craft matched Tendulkar's, the position of his feet and his head immaculate, his determination implacable. That he knew, in his heart, that he would lose made his effort more glorious.

Some people in Australia want to sack him. Maybe they will, if this curiously flaky team loses to England at home. But history will be kind. He was great, Sachin was great, the pure spirit of the game was inside them.

Swanny: the new Ringo

Graeme Swann's post-match TV interviews are starting to remind me of those archive clips you see of the Beatles holding press conferences in the early 60s - someone asks a question and it's met by a quip, one that quite often sounds like a non-sequitur and which makes the other Beatles laugh but not any of the press.

Ricky Ponting, meanwhile, just speaks faster after every defeat. There must be a correlation between the speed of his delivery and the scale of the loss. If they go down at the Oval and Lord's, we might need captions...

Face value

To the Rose Bowl, for an implausibly perfect summer day in the Hamble Valley, cradle of the game, the kind of day that you bat on in your dreams. The game was won by a dream of an innings too. The prime currency in the new age of batting is power, but yesterday, power alone was not enough. Rapier thrusts were what counted.

The last time I saw the captain of Australia in the flesh, he was walking down the street. Yesterday, before the game, he took some throw downs right in front of us. For anyone who loves batting, it was worth the price of admission alone. He brought a couple of bats, and, with one pad on, began drilling the ball back past the thrower. The first bat went okay, but when he switched to the second, the ball started to ring from it. With small turns of the face, he hit balls of exactly the same length and direction in an arc from cover to mid on.

Shane Watson, a new brutalist, had a go after Ponting, and he struck the ball harder, but each of his just ran straight back past the thrower. After a while he lumbered off, none the wiser about his game.

Ponting had a couple of purely struck boundaries before he fell hook-pulling [again], but Eion Morgan showed exactly the value of being able to control the bat face as England glided home. Gripping right down at the base of the handle, he slid the ball through ridiculously narrow gaps in the field without raising his bat above the horizontal. Ponting knew Australia were done way before the end, and he knew he couldn't stop it, either.

Congratulations, Ricky Ponting!

Yes, after Daniel Vettori did him with a direct hit yesterday, Ricky Ponting is now Test cricket's most run out batsman. 

Well done Punter! To celebrate the achievement, let's enjoy this one again. And not forgetting this one, of course. 

NB: The next two on the list are Aussies too, AB and Haydos. Sometimes it's the only way to get rid of 'em...

Pull the other one

Two out of form batsmen, two pull shots, one caught, one dropped, one gone for seven, one 137 not out... Well you know - is there a god or isn't there? Depends on which player you ask.

Last night I sat up to see the start of Australia-Pakistan. Katich lumbered in front of one early and got video-replayed out. Ponting came in and hoiked his first short ball to Mohammad Aamer. Didn't have to move. Spilled it like the U17 player he is... Ponting, remarkably, carried on pulling. It took him about two hours to hit one even half-decently.

This morning, Pietersen got in early against South Africa, drilled one down the ground like a man who'd remembered where his stumps were, then hoiked a short ball straight to midwicket. Wayne Parnell caught it like the U19 player so recently was.

Both shots seemed nervously offered, both though came from the machismo of the big player. Ponting played it because he'd told the press he was going to. He was raging against the dying of the light. Pietersen played it because in his head he's the kind of player who plays the pull shot. No surrender.

A coach will tell you to put the cross-bat shots away until your timing comes back and you can read the speed of the pitch. Yet Pietersen and Ponting and the like stand above conventional wisdom. They'll tell you that the pull shot is the symbol of their dominance. They just have to accept the capricious nature of fate from time to time.

Moving day

While England's batting order looks as immovable as Kim Jong Il [We won't be dropping Ian Bell because er, we didn't take anyone else apparently], perhaps Australia's will become more fluid ahead of next winter.

If Ponting misses the Boxing Day test, given his current run and the passing years, it might be time for him to turn the number five slot back into the 'skipper and proven batting great' position, much as Viv Richards and Steve Waugh did at the tail end of their careers, and come back into the side there. 

It would remove some pressure from Ponting, and allow Michael Clarke to shift, breaking the stasis in a line-up that doesn't quite seem to fit together any more. Clarke obviously needs to move up, Watson will ultimately move down. Hussey could shift to three until his exit, North is expendible - there is a new generation waiting now, and he, Hussey, Katich and Punter are all into their 30s. 

Transitioning towards the Ashes, Australia could line-up:

2010:

Katich

Hughes

Hussey

Clarke

Ponting

Watson

2011:

Katich

Hughes

Clarke

Marsh/Marsh/Klinger, whichever young blade is making the noise

Ponting

Watson

Go on, lettem in...

The gentle sense of melancholy that followed Mark Ramprakash's one hundredth hundred last season was not entirely down to Ramps and what might have been. It felt like one of the game's great marks of batsmanship was sliding into the past. No current player was close enough to the line to get there; no future player would play enough first-class cricket. Perhaps Ramprakash was the last.

But statistics only mean anything if they allow for some kind of adjustment: no-one denies Grace his status despite a Test average of 32.29. Watching Ricky Ponting score a sublime, chanceless ton against England last night, another adjustment seems due. 

It really doesn't need saying that Ponting and Tendulkar are not just contemporary greats, but worthy of comparison to anyone who's played the game. They are due that accolade of 100 centuries.

Ponting has 72 by the current measure, Sachin 69. But it feels like it's time to start counting their one-day international hundreds, too: Ponting has 28 of those, Sachin 44 [44!].

The argument against has always been that ODI hundreds were scored in reduced circumstances. Bowlers were limited in the number of overs they could send down, fields have been restricted, powerplays introduced and so on. Yet could anyone watch Ponting deliver last night, or in the World Cup Final of 2003 and say that those were innings any less brilliantly constructed, any less dominant or wilfull, any less pressured or easier than a nice afternoon knock in the LV county championship division two? Was the bowling any worse, the fielding any poorer?

Between them, Ponting and Tendulkar have played 763 ODIs - almost two solid years' worth. The structure of their careers will not allow them to get a hundred hundreds in the conventional manner, so maybe the conventional manner should change with the times.

If it did, Sachin would already be there, Ponting would have arrived last night, via a glorious knock in an international game. And it's not as if the change would open the floodgates: the great Lara would still have fallen short.

Brief Encounter

Idling along High Street Kensington today, just out of the tube station and heading slightly against the tide, I glanced up and thought, 'Oh, that bloke looks like Shane Watson'. Then I realised it was Shane Watson, in a cheery yellow T-shirt. Skulking along next to him, looking like his sidekick in a grey T-shirt and baseball hat, was the captain of Australia, RT Ponting. 

Having spent most of the summer watching them play, it seemed strangely normal to see them walking up the street. I almost nodded hello before I remembered I don't actually know them.

A few minutes later came Mike Hussey, who was uttering the sentence, 'just ask Alex to get them for you' to his mate. Who Alex is and what s/he can get will forever remain a mystery...

You'll miss him when he's gone

It was somehow appropriate that Ricky Ponting went past Allan Border's 11,174 Test match runs on a grey day at a foreign field thousands of miles from home; an unflashy push, a smatter of applause, a few hard blinks of his eye, moisture maybe, or a little grit. There was no fuss for or by this most blue-collar of batsmen.

Strange to say, but Ponting deserved better. Circumstances have conspired to drop this mighty accomplishment into the life and times of a fading side in a tight series when other things matter more. The Australian press were preoccupied, the English had different things to write. 

Ponting played it down because that's his nature, a nature that stands in contrast to Lara and Tendulkar, the only men ahead of him now. They are regarded differently to Ponting, differently to everyone, but part of that separation has come from them. Both have embraced that difference, their specialness, far more readily than Ponting has.

Neither were good captains, but their careers will not be considered in that light. Ponting's might. He's not a great captain, he's not always a great man, but he is one of the towering batsmen of the age. This Englishman's cap is doffed.

Time's arrow

Perhaps Ricky Ponting has played his last T20 international. The game's waiting for no man at the moment, and Ponting looked like yesterday's man during Australia's two games. His bewilderment at their exit was perhaps the most bewildering thing of all: how could he not see what was wrong?

It's strange that such an instinctive batsman, one with an eye for the kill, seems to lack a feel for the ebb and flow of the game, yet it has always been missing. Ponting's professional life has run along straight rails, he is the uber-pro, brought up by Taylor and Waugh, the man anointed young to take over the war machine. So grooved was that machine it didn't take much insight to run it, just that flinty sporting heart that allows you to put a foot on a head that's already been in the dirt for days. 

But few great sportsmen are schooled purely by victory. Waugh was the last Australian captain that knew not just what it was to lose, but to be beaten. On the few occasions Ponting has been confronted by it, he hasn't really known what to do. The most resourceful captains of recent years - Hussain, Vaughan, Vettori - knew the feeling inside out. When your plans work for years on end, you don't really need any others. 

The other great and intangible facet of captaincy is personality, but what is Ponting's? After all of this time, I'm not sure anyone really knows that much about him. Under extreme pressure Waugh had that bloody-minded steel, that thrilling love of the fight. Vaughan had a preternatural calm that held flaky England together. Ponting's prime traits have been anger, frustration. 

He's been uneasy with his selectors, short of faith in some of his players, and, like Langer and Hayden, he has a hankering for the good old days. He thought T20 was a joke - he was not alone there - but he failed to catch up. He looked bewildered at the World Championship, and more than that, he looked old, his face deeply lined, his body-language agitated. His confusion was manifested most in his handling of Brett Lee. In a game where one bad over results in a 'thanks very much' and a quick hoicking off, Lee bowled three in a row. 

Now he's clinging to the win over South Africa at the start of the year, but South Africa's recent history is one of boom and bust, each big win followed by a big deflation. Australia's weaknesses - no spinner, a tendency to collapse against spin, Mike Hussey's decline and Brett Lee's too - have not been managed, or even addressed.

That's not to say that England will win the Ashes, but they might if they exploit the holes. T20 may be nothing like Test cricket, but it proved a decent x-ray of the Australian condition, and of Ricky Ponting's. Time's arrow is flying his way.

Ricky Ponting, Assistant to the Regional Manager

A decade ago, Ricky Ponting would have been high on the list of people who might never utter the phrase 'moving through some processes'.

Now though he has uttered it.

There is no hope. We've run it up the flagpole. And the world has finally jumped the shark. 

Making Haigh, and punting on Punter

For all cricket correspondents embarking on their 'Australia's fallen empire' piece, here's how it's done, courtesy of Gideon Haigh.

It's a piece filled with lovely, wry lines ('Michael Hussey's average has deflated like a sub-prime asset book') and genuine insight ('This defeat does not mark the end of an era. The era had already ended. And the 13 year green-and-gold age has really been a series of overlapping phases, subtly different, distinguished by key retirements'). Here is real writing.

He also touches on a point that seems to be generally accepted: that Ricky Ponting would retire rather than play under another captain. 

I wonder if that's true. Ponting is still only 34, that glorious late summertime for Test batsmen. The ageless (and for the most part captaincy-free) Tendulkar, and Jacques Kallis apart, he must be the only mid-30 year old with 127 Tests and more than 300 ODIs, and his record as a batsman is exemplary. Within four years, every major landmark aside from Lara's high scores could be his. 

In the hazy way of perception he somehow seems more vital than Michael Vaughan (34), Mohammad Yousuf (34), Rahul Dravid (35), VVS Laxman (34) and the hooded-eyed Kallis (still just 33). Only Chanderpaul, impish as ever at 34, seems to have as much gas in the tank.

Katich is the man most mentioned, and he is just a year Ponting's junior. If Ricky took the Tendulkar/Lara view of the captaincy - a cross you have to bear from time to time - he might live forever in their exalted company. 

Ricky Ponting and the Big Machine: An Xmas Fairytale

Ricky always knew he'd get to drive the big machine one day. Everyone told him that he would. At first he just enjoyed riding on it with all of the other lads. Mark was the driver. He kept on adding bits to the machine until no-one could stop it. Then one day Mark put on a shirt and tie instead of his cricket kit and started telling people about how the machine worked, so Steve began driving instead. 

That was brilliant. If anyone got in Steve's way, he would pull his cap down really low and drive the machine straight at them. If they didn't move, Steve said to them, 'hey mate, this machine is going to run you over. Reckon you can take it?'. He called it 'mental disintegration', although the lads said it was just fucken sledging, like normal. 

Steve took the machine really seriously. Everyone aboard had to go on these trips, which were like school trips, where you had to look at historical stuff and think about Australia and how great it was. Steve's brother Mark was much more fun. He would stand at the back with Ricky, and when Steve wasn't looking, they would sneak away to really fun places, like the trots or the pub.

Steve drove the machine for years. Ricky grew impatient. He wanted his turn. All Steve would let him do was stand on a table and sing the team song after the machine had run someone else over. That got boring, even for a simple soul like Ricky. Other people kept telling Steve that he should let Ricky drive soon but every time they did, Steve would pull out his red rag, blow his nose on it and score another hundred, even if he had a bad leg, which he usually did because he was really old. 

Then one day, out of the blue, it happened. Someone threw Ricky the keys to the machine. He climbed the steps to the top and took his seat behind the big wheel. All around him, the levers and pedals glistened, because Steve had really looked after them. It was a fantastic view. Ricky didn't waste another second. He threw the machine into gear and started driving, running people over just like Mark and Steve had shown him. If the machine ever slowed down or hit a corner, he just had to pull the Glenn lever or floor the Shane pedal and it would speed up again.

Ricky couldn't work out why everyone made such a fuss about driving it. It was simple! 

'Any idiot could do this,' he thought to himself. 

He liked to drive with his foot down all the time. There were a couple of blokes in India that he didn't run over and everyone told him to watch his driving, but he'd shown them. He just carried on as usual, and soon the machine was running everyone over again. Even when he'd hurt himself and had to let this do-gooder swottie kid named Adam drive it back to India, the machine kept working. He'd made Adam give the keys straight back after, though. It wasn't his to keep!

He took the machine to England and started running them over, like usual. But the Glenn bit broke for a while, and the big fat boiler they called Matthew wouldn't make the machine go fast enough for once, and the rubbishy English wagon overtook them right at the end. And then everyone had a go at Ricky when they got back home! He couldn't bloody believe it! He'd pressed all the usual pedals. How was it his fault if they didn't work properly? Get a life!

John at the garage took the machine to the bush and had all the parts repaired and cleaned up. 'Fucken' excellent, it works again' thought Ricky, and he drove it back and forward over England's wagon, which had loads of bits missing now. He kept using all of his favourite levers and pedals, too: Glenn, Shane, Matty, Adam, Justin... Magic!

One by one though, the machine's best parts disappeared. Ricky hadn't spotted that they'd been working hard for so long. He thought they'd keep going forever! Why would they want to stop - no-one could beat them. They even got a new mechanic, this bloke called Tim who said he'd been on a machine himself once, but Ricky wasn't sure that he had. 

He told Tim what sort of things he wanted to put on the machine. Tim got him a part that looked like Shane, called Stuart, but that broke and Tim got all these other parts that weren't anything like Shane. He got another bit called Stuart who looked like Glenn, but Stuart was second hand and had a crack in him. Brad fitted into the machine where Adam used to be, but everyone said Brad was a bit more like this really old bit called Ian, who now watched the machine with Mark. 

The machine worked okay for a while. Ricky ran it over India again, and he gave them a right old mouthful out of the window while he did it. People even moaned about that! What was their problem? Mental disintegration, it was called. 

But then he drove it to India and the machine broke. Steam came out of it. Ricky couldn't work out why. He pulled all of the same levers and pressed the usual pedals, but nothing happened. What was wrong with the machine now? 

He took it back home, where Tim gave him some really good news. South Africa were coming! Ricky needed that! If there was one team that went red and started crying as soon as it saw the machine it was South Africa. 

Ricky climbed back on and pointed it at them. It spluttered forwards. He stoked the Matty boiler, but all that came out was hot air. He went for the Stuart lever but it had broken off! This old Brett pedal which worked now and again wouldn't move when he pressed it. Automatically, though force of habit, he reached for Shane button, but in its place were two or three others, and none of them looked anything like Shane. They made the machine do funny things instead! 

The Saffer wagon moved alongside and rammed them. Ricky felt himself jolt in his seat. He didn't want to get rammed again, so he pulled over and said he wasn't going to race South Africa until he'd had the chance to open his Xmas pressies. That fooled them! 

Ricky walked right up to all of the men in suits and ties and told them straight: 'this fucken machine don't work like I told it to. That ain't my fault, see. Some of these parts were just passengers, along for the ride. Why don't you go and ask them a bunch of questions, not me!'

In the dead of night, when no-one was around, Ricky got up, pulled on his CA trackie-dacks and went to look at the machine. It didn't look so hot. Why wouldn't they just buy him a new one instead of trying to patch this fucken old thing up? He pulled off the Krezja button. He wrenched the Brett lever until it was all twisted and ready to come off. He thought about the Matty boiler and all the fucken rattle it was making. He kicked and pulled and spat. 

The sun came up. Ricky was sitting on the floor next to the machine. All around him were parts that he had pulled off. He realised that he didn't even know where they went. 'Sheesh,' he thought. 'They'll probably expect me to put all of these bits back'. 

These people were impossible to please. They didn't just want him to be the driver. They expected him to understand how the machine worked too. Ricky put his hands in his trackie-dacks pockets. 'Hmm,' he thought. 'What should I do next?'

Punter punts

Two things that that we outsiders always took as planks of Australian cricket:

i) Pick the team then pick the captain

ii) Let the opposition worry about you

Ricky Ponting after the Test at the Gabba: 'I just think we've got to be a bit more flexible in our selection in different places. We need to look at every way we can to have the most impact. They're some of the lessons we all learned in India. We could have been better equipped for those conditions and if we come up against conditions like that, in Australia or the world*, we need to have guys who can play in them'.

What a very English argument.

Ricky Ponting's average in 2008 - 43.55. From India onwards - 31.88. What a very English average. Don't talk yourself out of a job, pal.

* Australia is actually part of the world, even though it doesn't seem like it sometimes.

Sights you thought you'd never see

Headline in the Sydney Morning Herald

'Black Caps Destroy Australia At The Gabba' *

Now we know why Punter felt he had to be there.

* 'Destroy' might be a little strong with four days left, no...?

Average.

Who knows what's in Ricky Ponting's head at the moment. Probably something which sounds like that really terrible album Radiohead made after OK Computer, playing over and over again. 

Then, through all the white noise and static and steely screech of alienation comes something else: the sound of Harbhajan Singh.

'Ponting is a very average captain and an average player too. I can get Ponting out any time. Even when I come post a six-month lay off. He got a hundred in Bangalore but I don't think that's enough. He needs to come back and score some more before he can claim to be a complete batsman. He needs to go and learn to bat against spin bowling.'

Somehow the word 'average' really does its work here.

Yeah but, no but...

Australians are brilliant, aren't they? When they lose a series, they require their captain to face the press as soon as he gets back home. And when they say as soon as he gets back home, they mean at the airport. 

It's happened to Ricky Ponting twice now, in 2005, and again yesterday. Assuming the position once more, he said, 'I've had an opportunity to sit back over the last couple of days and think about those decisions that I've made, or that I made there and then, and even talking to other players, I'm very comfortable with the decisions that I've made'.

Shane Warne helpfully translated via his newspaper column: 'One of Rick's strengths is to admit his mistakes and I'm sure on the way home he relived every moment of the final Test and the mistakes that he made'. 

Cheers, Warnie. Thanks for that. Ponting also received some 'help' from fearless team coach Tim Nielsen, who used the high-profile forum of his blog to address the subject of the over rate: 'is it alright to break the rules as long as you win without worrying about the consequences?'

Er, hasn't stopped them any other time, Tim. You sure you're Australian? Check your passport, fella.

Meanwhile, England have been enjoying the advantages of having KP as captain. His technique is far simpler and more effective than Ponting's. He just pretends it hasn't happened. 'Oh, what, that match? That knockabout you're referring to? I'd forgotten about that. We're just focused on our controllables...'

As Ed Smith rightly pointed out in The Wisden Cricketer, technology means that today's player can no longer return to the pavilion claiming to have been sawn off when he wasn't. The truth is all they have back in the dressing room. The main arena for creative excuses now comes in front of the media. Excellent!