Poor old Ponting. He lets the over-rate slip, we get stuck into him. He tries to get it back on track, we get stuck in. He can't win.
Now, there is no doubt he is not our best ever captain (I like Tubby Taylor). But he's not too bad. His own batting has certainly picked up since becoming captain - he averages 59.78 as captain vs. 55.97 when not.
If Ponting lost the Test, he lost it at the toss. And let's remember that even if he had bowled his good bowlers instead of the part-timers, he would have bowled a completely out-of-form Brett Lee and the over-rated Shane Watson. It's not like he spurned McGrath and Warne. And he was bowling Jason Krezja, the bloke who took all the wickets anyway, from the other end. Also, in theory, he brought on our number one spinner in Cameron White.
Where Ponting did fail was letting us get behind in the over-rate in the first place. Dhoni did it, but they won so it didn't matter. Ponting may have to get used to not winning and work out a way to get the overs in - stop changing fields every 3 balls would probably be a good start.
Ponting was just doing what he had to - especially in these troubled times of neurotic worry about Twenty20. Gideon Haigh has a good take on this. I also suspect that this was a team decision - it certainly wasn't simply down to Ponting.
My questions are, why didn't he bowl Katich? And why haven't we sacked the selectors yet?
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I agree - ultimately it smacks of Aussie arrogance to accuse Ponting of losing us this Test.
Really, with the bowling attack we had and from everything we had seen in the previous tests, we really were NOT bowling the Indians out cheaply, simple as that.
The pace bowlers seemed to have little venom at the best of times this series, and at the end of the day our "strike" bowler was Krejza and he was bowling at the other end.
We're pointing fingers at the moment because we just can't stand losing, but the reality of the situation is, we don't have Warne, we don't have McGrath - we're just not the same team, so we just can expect the same things.
It's not Ponting's fault.
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