Ricky Ponting tips the Aussie team with spin tactics

Sri Lanka beat Australia in a convincing fashion at Pallakele. After the defeat, there has been a flurry of advice for the Australian team about how better to tackle the spin threat posed by Rangana Herath and Lakshan Sandakan.

The former Australian skipper Ricky Ponting is probably the one who had to learn the hard way through successive poor tours of India in 1996, 1998 and 2001.

False step of indoor nets:

“What was difficult about working on playing spin in Australia in the offseason, particularly in Adelaide, was, we were doing it all in the indoor nets and it was so false,” Ponting told ESPNcricinfo in 2013. “You could run down the wicket without any fear at all of getting stumped or one spinning past the outside edge. You just had the freedom to hit the ball wherever you wanted to.

“In the nets there I was a pretty good player of spin, but when you got out into the middle on Adelaide Oval or the SCG, where it used to spin a lot, against two of the country’s best spinners [Tim May and Greg Matthews] it was a different game altogether. It was right-arm off-spin out of anything that troubled me the most,” he added.

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Hit before it spun or well after it spun:

He also advised the team on how to deal the turning ball as the basic idea is to hit it before it turns or hit well after the ball had spun.

“On the truer wickets it was okay because you could get away with it, but the one thing I learned about playing spin in India … the first couple of tours were horrible, but the last few tours I had there where I actually understood what I was trying to do a bit better, I actually had some success,” Ponting said. “It was all about not getting trapped to good-length balls. Not trying to predict where the ball was going to spin to. It was about trying to hit it before it spun or [well] after it spun, and that’s what the good Indian players always did.”

“That’s a concept that Australian batters don’t have to think about because the ball doesn’t spin very much in domestic cricket here. Even our current blokes, if you look at the struggles they had against [Graeme] Swann in the last Ashes series, it was because you’re just not brought up seeing and playing quality spin, and more importantly playing it in conditions that actually favour the bowler. Even with our practice facilities in Australia, you don’t get that very often,” he added.

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Dhoni does it really well: Ricky Ponting

Ponting rated MS Dhoni and Mohammad Azharuddin the players who use this tactic well. “If you watched the way he played, he was always out in front, flicking his wrists, and for us, that was so foreign,” Ponting said.

“Dhoni does it really well as well. He’s not actually a great player of spin bowling but he’s got the technique there where they work the ball around and never get caught at bat-pad or done on length. When we go there we always get caught at bat-pad because we’re predicting where the ball is going to go.”

“But yeah, I first heard it from [Azharuddin], he talked about getting to it on the half-volley before it has the chance to spin or get back in your crease and wait for it fully spin and play it from there. It sounds pretty easy but it’s difficult to do in the heat of battle against good quality spin bowling. But the technique makes a lot of sense,” he signed-off.

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