Former captain Ricky Ponting has weighed in on England’s woeful Ashes campaign, saying it’s probably the worst-looking English side to have toured Australia for the prestigious series. With Australia comfortably winning the first three Tests to take an unassailable 3-0 lead in the five-match series, England’s dreams of winning back the Ashes have gone up in smoke, and if things are to get better, Ponting suggests the visiting team goes back to the drawing board if they are to add a semblance of respect to the score line.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a worse-performing team in Australia than what I’ve seen over the last three games. We’ve been through this in Australia. You wind the clock back a few years ago when we had our struggles in England, we changed conditions, we changed the ball, we changed everything because we were poor in those conditions,” Ponting told cricket.com.au.
“England might need to have a look at how they can make their conditions more suitable to ours. They play well in England still but they don’t play well when they come here – so maybe they play more with the Kookaburra ball. Maybe they flatten the wickets out a little bit so there’s not as much swing and seam, so the batters are making bigger scores and batting for longer periods of time. It might be the exact same blip that (Australia) had to have three or four years ago.”
England have suffered whitewashes earlier in Australia, notably the 2013 series but this time around, seeing the batting capitulate is new low, feels Ponting. Barring Joe Root and Dawid Malan, the rest of the English batters was cut a sorry figure, and there has been absolutely nothing from the likes of Zak Crawley, Haseeb Hameed, Ollie Pope and even Ben Stokes.
“Some of the English top-order batters that I’ve seen in the last couple of tours, without giving names, there’s some techniques there that I just know are not going to stand up at Test level. In challenging conditions and world-class bowlers up against sub-standard techniques, then you get what happened at the MCG,” added Ponting.
“The little swing dibbly-dobblers that are getting them out over there (in county cricket), they’re not facing that at Test level. They’re facing guys who can actually bowl. What I’ve seen with their batting, they’re just simply not good enough.”
