Dropping Ponting The Right Thing To Do

After being appointed as head of Australia's new selector's panel at the back end of 2011, John Inverarity has wasted no time in making his mark on Australian cricket. After the failures during the Ashes a year before and the fall-out from the Argus Review, Australia's team has undergone a rapid makeover, with the chaff cut and new faces blooded in their place. Australia's success in such a short length of time is due heavily to the ruthless cull from the selectors, and their ability to find replacements who were good enough to come into the team and perform straight away. If you weren't doing your job, regardless of any past glories, you were out, and someone new was in.

The selectors have today shown that sentiment is of no relevance to their decisions, with the Ricky Ponting, he of 375 ODIs and 13704 50-over runs, being unceremonially booted out of the squad midway through the tri-series. While Ponting has arguably been Australia's most successful ODI player ever, the recent dry spell of five consecutive single figure scores has meant that he isn't justifying his place, and has been shown the door. On the face of it, the decision is obvious - Ponting won't be around for the 2015 World Cup, isn't scoring enough runs, and Australia have plenty of replacements ready to come in. John Inverarity tellingly said: "You don't put your heart to one side, but your head has got to dominate, and to the credit of the NSP, everyone holds Ricky in the highest regard, as a player and as a person, but we've got a decision to make, and we made a decision we believe is the right decision and the best decision in the interest of Australian cricket". Wise words indeed.

Ponting being dropped will of course upset a true legend of Australian cricket, but the selectors know that it's worth a few days of angst from Ponting if the team is to be more successful with him out rather than in it. Compare this ruthless attitude to that of the Indian selection panel. While in the recent test series, Australia were prepared to make some big calls and change things, India were all too happy to watch their team of legends fail, and fail again, coming off the back of tour of England where they failed even more. While a few superficial changes were made to the bowling attack, the much vaunted batsmen were left to their own devices. It's telling that the only batsman to get the chop after the English tour was Suresh Raina, who conveniently was the only batsman not to be backed up by thousands of caps or hundreds of hundreds. It was patently obvious that India's top, and middle order needed to be broken up and scrapped despite their success over previous decades, but nobody in the Indian selection panel was brave enough to make those gutsy calls, even though their over-the-hill performers just weren't cutting it.

Neither India or Australia are the best teams in world cricket, but Australia have realised this and are attempting to find a way to take over the mantle once again. India, on the other hand, have consistently buried their heads in the ground, and have blissfully ignored their big problems. The focus isn't on test cricket for a while, with the circus of a unnecessarily long ODI tournament taking centre stage for the time being, but before too long both teams will be back in the whites with some big calls to make. Australia's big calls, including dropping Ponting, have shown that nobody's place is guaranteed, which has led to players constantly needing to stay on the top of their games to stay in the side. Certainly the same can't be said about India, as too many players have been given places in the team for life, and they've been firmly in the comfort zone ever since. The big calls must be made, and Australia's success over recent times have proved their worth. Whether India can follow suit remains to be seen...

Podcast - Samit Patel's Probably Still Eating

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Yet another week has passed without Sachin making his #100th100, so Will looks at why, and how this is impacted on India's performances. Also at the SCG, Michael Clarke made hundreds of sticker-less runs, and Will looks at Clarke's potential as both a batsman and a captain. England have flown out to the UAE to take on Pakistan, so the series is previewed, as well as the England v Associates game that will take place. Pretty much everything that's happened this week in cricket, except Jacques Kallis getting 200 in his 150th test. Sorry Jacques.

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Criticsms of Clarke

Getting to the highest score in the history of test cricket isn't something that happens every day. Of all of the hundreds of thousands of test innings, to be ranked as the highest is some achievement, so a changing of the guard is very rare indeed (between 1938 and 1994 it only changed once). To post an absolute great grand-daddy triple or quadruple ton, you need to be one of three things. Either a) massively selfish and happy to play a long personal innings irregardless of the match situation (see Lara's 400 not out v England in 2004), b) playing against a crap team on a road (see Hayden's 380 v Zimbabwe in 2003), or c) freakishly good (see Bradman, numerous).

Cricket is an odd game, as it is a pursuit of individual success masquerading as a team sport. In no other team sport are personal statistics pored over so often and held with such reverence, or individual glory celebrated so vocally (see Sachin, various). While everyone says that they just love winning test matches and like doing well for the team, deep down every cricketer who's picked up a bat wants to put themselves in the history books. Sure, winning's nice, but what about a bit of personal glory?

Which makes Michael Clarke's decision to declare unbeaten on 329 slightly odd. Yes, as captain he should be seen to put the team first, but imagine the statue he would have got outside the SCG had he got past 400? In 9 months time there would be a boom of babies born in Australia, all nicknamed Pup, and he could have had his own ill-fated chat show. Against a tired, disinterested Indian attack, 401 and history was there for the taking, and Clarke let the pesky matter of trying to win a test match get in his way. And he didn't have the smarts to get a lucrative bat sponsor for this game. For shame.

Ricky Ponting's 70th 100

Pretty much all of the build-up to the Sydney test, as with pretty much every Indian game since the World Cup, has been focussed on Sachin Tendulkar's persuit of the elusive 100th international 100. Since making his 99th on the 12th March, the cricketing world has been on edge to see if the Little Master can go where no other batsman has gone before, and into triple figures for triple figure international scores.

Sachin's quest has been dragging on for a while now, and the spotlight hasn't become any less intense. On Twitter, which is always the best barometer to the cricketing world's feelings, each Sachin innings starts with a flurry of "I have a feeling, today will be the day" tweets, followed by the inevitable "Oh well, I'm sure he'll do it in the next knock". It would not be wrong of me to say that there are some more concerned about Sachin's personal scores than the state of the matches he plays in.

But ultimately, if Sachin did get to his 100th 100, it wouldn't really be that important. His place in the side doesn't rely upon it, nor would his legend be diminished if he fell narrowly short. It is solely a statistical quirk, and just an opportunity to celebrate the incredible career that the man demi-god has had. That could not be said of Ricky Ponting.

Ponting, like Sachin, is a bona fide legend, not just of our time, but of any time. Yet his search for a ton has lasted a lot longer than Sachin's, with January 2010 being the last occassion Ricky passed three figures in test cricket. Since then, the Ashes have been lost (again), the captaincy has fallen by the wayside, and an alarming dip in form has led quite a few to call for Ponting to either stand aside, or be stood aside. A few fifties in recent tests signalled some sort of revival, but without the headline grabbing hundred, Ponting would continue to be under pressure, and questions would continue to be asked.

Which is why Ponting making a hundred at the SCG was far more important or newsworthy than if Sachin had got there. Ponting's shows that he's still got the guts, ability, and run-making for test cricket, and is clearly still worth a place in this Australian team, and might be good for a Dravid style renaissance (let us not forget that The Great Wall finished 2011 as test cricket's top run scorer). Sachin's would show the ultimate endurance effort, and be the culmination of a great career, but other than an interesting statistic, it doesn't mean a great deal.

This isn't to say I won't stand and applaud if/when Sachin gets there, but at this moment in time, Ponting getting there is a far greater moment. There have been some who've called Ponting's 134 the biggest of his career, and while I wouldn't go that far, it could well be the signal of a return to the top for Punter, and for a few more years in the Aussie middle order.