Like any good Test match, Lord’s was great theatre. It was also passable pantomime, with Andrew Flintoff in fee-fi-fo-fum form, smelling the blood of an Aus-tray-lyun. Of course, every panto needs a villain, and one arrived ready-made in Ricky Ponting.
When his praise for England in a gracious post-match concession speech was applauded, Ponting smiled and said it was the first cheer he’d had in five days. He was wrong about that, having been cheered on the first day—when he misfielded. Otherwise, to be sure, he went about mostly to jeers and boos—from the crowd, from Marylebone Cricket Club members, from the English press, and increasingly from his own fickle media.
Ponting’s problem is that the steady dwindling of his baggy green generation has left him the only Australian recognisable to English audiences; thus he bears the brunt of all their peeves and prejudices about antipodean attitude and aggression. The identification of Australians with no-beg-pardons cricket provokes bristling and cries of ‘hypocrisy’ when Ponting invokes the ‘spirit of cricket’, as he did at the end of the Cardiff Test in the context of England’s time wasting.
Yet Ponting’s remarks in Cardiff were actually the acme of restraint. He honestly admitted to some annoyance with the home team’s tactics, then frankly dismissed them as insignificant. Strange that straight answers to straight questions could give such offence among the same constituency that always bemoans spin doctoring and doublespeak.
Ponting was the same at Lord’s in the face of umpiring so execrable, and consistently favourable to his opponents, that regular counting to six seemed the best that could be hoped for: mild irritation on the spur of the moment, neither complaints nor excuses in the aftermath. Lord’s, meanwhile, which preens itself as the locus classicus of the spirit of cricket, actually boos the best Australian Test batsman since Bradman—now that’s hypocrisy.
The irony is that if a single player in the world could be regarded as a cricket traditionalist, even a bit of a reactionary, it is Ponting. He is a Test cricketer to the marrow, obsessed enough with the Ashes to have forgone the riches of the IPL before this series, so dedicated to its symbolism that he attends Test match press conferences in his whites and wearing his baggy green—unlike English players, who are studies in sponsor-friendly casual wear.
While Ponting does not publicly fetishise the cap like his predecessor Waugh, he privately honours it, maintaining the custom of Australian XIs presenting a united baggy green front in the first session of every Test match. A few years ago in Cape Town, noticing that Shane Warne had opted for the white floppy, he even pulled rank and brought Warne into line.
In the most recent of his surprisingly thoughtful tour diaries, Ponting professes a healthy scepticism about Twenty20, which he sardonically observes reminds him of ‘schoolboy games when it was two or three stars in a side who scored all the runs and bowled all the overs’. He complains of the favouritism it shows straightforward hitters over more complete players, for he is universally admiring of good technique.
Elsewhere in the book, there is a fascinating account of a spell he faced in last year’s Perth Test from India’s Ishant Sharma—one from which Ponting emerged second-best. Nonetheless, he concludes: ‘It was great sport, and I was lucky to be part of it.’ The form of words may be his ghostwriter’s; the sentiments sound authentically Ponting’s.
Above all, where decisions concerning low catches are concerned, Ponting and the Australians have striven, over many years but without success, against the tide in favour of yet more ineffective replay technology, promoting instead the idea that players accept one another’s words. It’s been greeted sceptically—admittedly, not without reason. But, in principle, what could be more in the spirit of cricket that MCC holds so dear?
Ponting’s unpopularity is partly of his own making. He can be gruff. He has a temper. And where umpiring is concerned, he also has prior—far too much prior, and for which he was insufficiently chastised at the time. Now he is being judged in that light: he could ask an umpire to check his watch and detractors would construe it as flagrant disrespect for sundials.
Thus the mistaken conclusion of bullying taken by several commentators in the wake of Nathan Hauritz’s almost certainly fair catch of Ravi Bopara a week ago, when Ponting was merely asking about ‘the process’ of the adjudication: a fair enquiry, seeing that it was as explicable as the Schleswig– Holstein Question.
Perceptions of Ponting and his Australians, however, are out of date. The captain felt harshly judged after last year’s Sydney Test against India, but has worked hard to make amends; media perceptions often moving in arrears of reality, he is perhaps due more credit than he has received. The Australians’ recent disciplinary record is hard to fault. Ponting delivered the last Sir Donald Bradman Oration; his erstwhile deputy Adam Gilchrist delivered the recent Cowdrey Lecture. Ponting’s resolutions were sternly tested at Lord’s, but he lost well, even courageously, at least by Hemingway’s definition of courage as ‘grace under pressure’.
Meanwhile, in the floridness of the commentaries and the boorishness of the booing classes, the true nature of his offence is revealed. Ponting dared to mention philosophies. It is the prerogative of cricket’s privileged castes—its administrators, its commentariat and the members of its most exclusive club—to pontificate about those. Hands off our game, Tasmanian ruffian! In future, in the spirit of panto, Ponting will have to remember to look out behind him.