Ponting in Brisbane
For a split-second at the Gabba yesterday, Ricky Ponting would have thought that he was a goner. He had sallied forth for an opportunist single, been sent back by his partner Usman Khawaja, and was marooned far from safety.
An accurate throw from Brendon McCullum at cover would have left Australia three for 25 chasing nearly 300. Perhaps more importantly, it would have left Ponting with three noughts in his last four Test innings, and added to a roll of recent run-outs at a time when some would run him out of Test cricket.
The throw was wide. The chance went begging. It didn’t demoralise New Zealand, but it might conceivably have moralised Ponting. Lately he has had little luck, getting in only to get out in Sri Lanka, out before he could get in against South Africa, extending a long hiatus in production of centuries.
Was this, at last, an omen? Certainly, Ponting’s batting immediately began to look ominous. To enter double figures, he stretched forward to Southee and punctured the covers with a perfectly controlled check drive, then punched straight down the ground: no sign of falling across his stumps here. Swinging Bracewell to fine leg and Martin through mid-wicket, he recalled his salad days.
For a small man, Ponting has an enormous stride, and was yesterday turning deliveries barely overpitched into mouth-watering half-volleys. He was equally comfortable going the opposite direction, reaching 50 with a delectable back-foot punch off Martin. Later he repeated the stroke off Vettori through an off-side field that a fag paper could hardly have slid through. Once the vein of luck was tapped, too, it flowed. A review of an unsuccessful lbw appeal by Dean Brownlie when Ponting was 63 also went just his way.
Ponting has been spectacular on occasions in the last thirty months, but this was his most certain batting since his 150 at Cardiff at the outset of the 2009 Ashes, when he looked as complete and immoveable as a Doric column. What could today be his fortieth Test hundred may also be one of his best.
Australia was in need of Ponting’s best after faltering beginnings. Warner and Hughes might sound like an estate agency or a law firm, but as an opening partnership their names savour of everything but staidness.
Warner deserves to be judged on more evidence than his tweet of an innings yesterday, but Southee’s first ball was of the sort that a Test opener should really have been capable of leaving on length, rather than propping in the en garde position then being unable to elude.
It was the kind of dismissal to keep an instinctive player like Warner awake at night wondering about the gulf between the red ball game he longs to master and the white ball game he already has. At the moment it must seem like the distance between the NFL and lingerie football.
For his part, Hughes received a better ball, deviating nearly the width of the stumps, but it remains a concern how adept he is at making good deliveries seem all-but unplayable. To fall back on, Australia was lucky to have a cricketer who has forgotten more about Test batting than either Warner or Hughes will ever know.
Inexperience was also evident in the protracted morning session, as Australia’s callow pace attack struggled to maintain lines in the face of left- and right-handers, and all lengths were on the short side, which suited Vettori, who seldom ventures far forward and has long forsworn the conventional cover drive. An innings of 96 from 127 balls would normally be embellished with adjectives like ‘fluent’ or ‘sparkling’. Vettori’s was better attached to descriptions such as ‘practical’ and ‘businesslike’. Having come into Test cricket looking like a Bloomsbury aesthete, Vettori’s Cricinfo profile now features an image that resembles a photo ID for IBM in the 1950s. His slow bowling is still art, but his batting is free enterprise.
There was barely even a strangled appeal in the first hour, and little to disturb the serenity of the visitors’ progress, although Starc’s last-second hesitation turned a regulation chance from Vettori’s miscued sweep into a sudden unavailing lunge. With New Zealand five for 254, Australian fielders had gone more than 400 deliveries without accepting a slip catch or even scoring a direct hit.
At last Hussey from mid-off threw out Vettori, attempting an unnecessary and overambitious single, and Clarke snaffled nicks from Young then Bracewell down by his bootlaces. Lyon’s arm-ball to bamboozle the last was a collector’s piece of finger spin, and again he was the most impressive Australian bowler, varying his pace adeptly, using his full height and throwing his pipe-cleaner man physique around off his own bowling. Who’d have thought that the campaign to replace Shane Warne would end up with an investment in geek chic?
A good day ended badly. At 4.45 p.m., with Brownlie bowling to the Australians at three-fifths rat-power, umpires Aleem Dar and Asad Rauf pulled out their light meters and fussily whisked the players off, like teachers shushing schoolchildren in a museum. The sky was lightly clouded, the lights were ablaze, the match was nicely balanced and everything pointed to an intriguing last hour. Instead, pop music wafted from the public address system, advertisements played on the screen, fans began drifting towards the exits, and police and security staff moved to protective positions on the outfield to guard against incursions from empty terraces.
The new ICC playing condition regarding bad light worked in one way. The players could blame the umpires, the umpires could blame the light meters, the light meters could presumably blame their calibrations, and in the end society was perhaps to blame. But oh, one died inside. For the greatest game in the world, Test cricket can also exhibit an almost unrivalled capacity for looking ridiculous. Some think that Test cricket is a goner. It will certainly need luck to endure. Some days, as it was for Ponting today, the luck goes with you. But you don’t want to depend on it.
The Australian, November 2011