Captaincy of Strauss and Ponting

[Top_Cat]

Yeah, it's so frustrating. Is it that hard to just criticise certain aspects of a captaincy, rather than pan it outright every time he does something that you don't agree with?

Yeah you get the feeling this is why Roebuck and Botham didn't get along at Somerset. Botham likes to paint himself as a straight shooter so the artfully dodgy Roebuck would have grated like nothing else.

 

[Uppercut]

He tends to get wickets with bad balls, because he gives it a big rip. Doesn't get many catches around the bat, needs someone to be attacking him. Not really the option for that situation.

The googly was a serious option to clean up the tail-end lefties though.

 

[Furball]

He tends to get wickets with bad balls, because he gives it a big rip. Doesn't get many catches around the bat, needs someone to be attacking him. Not really the option for that situation.

Fair enough, I didn't see an awful lot of the series in South Africa, I'm only going off reading scorecards, hence why I thought the decision was a bit suprising.

 

[Richard]

This was the thread I was looking for.

Ponting captained fantastically for 4 days and 5 and and a half hours but feel he really missed a beat giving North a bowl at the end and probably over bowling Hauritz.

Thought that Hilfenhaus had to be one of the bowlers bowling at the end of the match alongside probably Siddle. I would have preferred an erratic Johnson over North at the end too.

Very vague shades of Gooch at the SCG in 1990/91. And you might just be old enough to remember that game too.

 

[Richard]

If anything stymied Australia's ambitions, it was the inclement weather - not really Ponting's captaincy.

Shades, in that, of Flintoff and Lord's 2006. Play lost to weather, and about 14,925 dropped catches in the match. Captain got the blame for not rotating his bowlers more, when the reality was that you can rotate as many bowlers as you want and if that many catches go down, you haven't a hope. The bowlers were actually doing a decent enough job, it was the fielders who failed. And that's clearly out of the captain's hands. As is the weather.