Ricky Ponting has named the three batsmen he thinks will play in the first Ashes Test and Australia’s opening series of the new World Test Championship cycle. He also had some advice for Sam Konstas, the struggling opening batter who has been talked about a lot lately.
Despite winning the Test series 3-0 in the West Indies, Australia’s batting lineup didn’t do much to silence the concerns about their weaknesses. They only scored over 300 once in the series and most of those runs came from the lower order.
Instead they relied a lot on their strong bowling attack with Mitchell Starc, Scott Boland and Josh Hazlewood leading the way. They bowled out the West Indies for 27 in the final innings.
Ponting said in The ICC Review that people have been talking about Konstas and Usman Khawaja for the past few weeks. There was also talk about whether Cameron Green should be the long term No. 3 batter.
He said Green’s second innings in the West Indies (in the last Test) might have silenced some of that. He batted for a long time in tough conditions which might have shut up some of his critics.
Ponting thinks the Ashes lineup will be the same as it is now. He believes that’s what they’re going to start with and hope those players can get the job done at the top.
A lot of attention has been on Konstas who besides an impressive half century in his debut against Jasprit Bumrah and India’s attack in last year’s Boxing Day Test has struggled to score runs. He averages 16.30 from his first 10 Test innings. But Ponting thinks Konstas faced a tougher introduction to Test cricket than most players.
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Ponting said he read a story by Robert Craddock about how the Australians tried to protect Sam Konstas from what they thought would be a very hard tour of Sri Lanka. They left him out hoping to bring him in the West Indies where things might be easier. But it turned out to be the opposite.He said the pitches and attack in Sri Lanka were good for batting, the pitches in the West Indies are hard for everyone to bat on. He pointed to the last Test where the West Indies were bowled out for 27 and said it wasn’t just the bowling that was good but the surface, the ball and everything.
