Is Ponting an unworthy successor to Steve Waugh? Or are they really peas from a pod, crude and petty sledgers, with Waugh smelling a little better only because he won more often? My friend Shukles got me thinking about this a couple of days ago, when he suggested that Ponting was no worse than Steve Waugh.
Consider the case for Steve Waugh:
- He found the time to support Udayan, a home for disadvantaged children in Barrackpore, Calcutta
- Waugh found the time to take his team to Gallipoli, to honour the ANZAC soldiers who fell there during WWI, starting off a little tradition
- He taught his team to enjoy playing in India, and more generally the sub-continent. Approaching the tour as a fun experience, rather than as a punishment posting probably had a big part to play in their improved results. One of my favourite photos from Waugh's autobiography is of his team, wearing their lurid yellow uniforms and with their backs to the camera, staring mesmerized at the Taj Mahal
- He encouraged Ed Smith, then a colleague at Kent, to write about what it is like to be a county pro. This is one of my favourite books about contemporary cricket
- He mourned the game's loss when Zimbabwe's Neil Johnson retired after a scintillating World Cup in 1999, including a century against Australia, because he needed to earn a living. He made a plea to the cricket community to support the game in Zimbabwe, because the game was poorer if a player of Johnson's quality could not play. For this, Sunil Gavaskar described Waugh as not just a great player, but a great leader of men. BTW, Gavaskar is no reflexive Aussie supporter.
I couldn't Google-up a link to Waugh's comments about Neil Johnson. It stuck in my memory because of Johnson's amazing personal story. Johnson was a superstar at seventeen, and a has-been at twenty. The South African team management (rightly) preferred Lance Klusener and Shaun Pollock to Neil Johnson for that all-rounder slot. Yet, he hung on to his dream, played for Zimbabwe, and got his revenge on the biggest stage of all when he single-handedly beat a South African team that included Klusener and Pollock in the 1999 World Cup, before riding off into the sunset.
Could a cussed captain have been made to look like a hero by a good spin-doctor? Some moments, like Udayan and Gallipoli, could have been stage managed, though they reflect well on Waugh even if those associations were prompted by an image-consultant. But the Ed Smith and Neil Johnson stories would have been hard for a spin-doctor to fabricate. Looking at the whole rather than at the parts, the gestalt, I still am left with the impression that Waugh was a genuinely gracious guy. He understood that he was a part of something bigger than himself.
If so, why did he sledge? In his autobiography he says "sledging invariably occured when a player was frustrated at his poor form and wanted to show how much he was trying and how much he was annoyed with his performance. It is a cheap way of getting attention...". In Waugh's framework, he did not sledge. He tried to engineer a collapse in his opponent's confidence, mental disintegration, which is a part of the game.
He famously tried to bring about Saurav Ganguly's mental disintegration. Ganguly did not disintegrate, and Waugh now talks about "an ongoing verbal battle between Saurav and me, which belied an underlying admiration for each other... I saw in Saurav a committed individual who wanted to inject some toughness and combativeness into a side that had often tended to roll over and expose a soft underbelly".
In Waugh's world, a captain who tries hard enough is a captain who tries to engineer the mental disintegration of his opponents. Nothing personal or disrespectful. It's just part of the game. Which is why Steve Waugh is such a hard act for Ponting to follow.
4 comments:
There is much to admire in Steve Waugh, as a batsman, as a tough as nails, 'over-my-dead-body' competitor (Waugh handed that baton over to Dravid), and as a human being.
Waugh the captain - I'm not so sure. He called it mental disintegration - I saw it as unacceptable, boorish behaviour on and off the field. Sledging can be crude and petty, it could also be funny and non-offensive (Sangakkara for instance). Under Steve Waugh, I'm afraid the wins overshadowed the declining standards of behaviour. Compare with the team under Mark Taylor - now there was a real leader of men.
Most comparisons are kind of pointless, but in my book, Ponting would fail a comparison to a demented gorilla stung in its derriere by a wasp. He is a great batsman. He'll probably own the record for most runs and most centuries by the time he is done, which is a shame, because those records should be held by gentlemen. Ponting is a low life on a high horse. The whole spirit of cricket thing is a mockery. I need just one illustration. In the Sydney test, Dhoni sweeps (I forget who the bowler was, perhaps Symonds), misses the ball, the ball hits the pads and goes to silly midoff where Ponting dives to catch the ball, lands on that hand and clearly grasses the ball and then claims the catch. It was given not out because there was no nick and hence it did not become much of a controversy in a match which had a controversy a session. But that shows what a sham Ponting's claim that the Aussies claim only clean catches is and that there word should hold. First of all, it is hypocritical and illogical to trust the guys who won't walk when they nick to be honest about catches. What kind of perverse logician would say that not walking is not cheating. I am not saying people should walk. But enough already about this trust us business on catches. Secondly, there is ample evidence that Aussies do claim catches that are not clean (Michael Clarke's claimed catch of Ganguly in the same Sydney test, Symonds claiming a clearly grassed catch vs SL that you can see at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV6UKQkMobU&feature=PlayList&p=BDAFC55B5BEB9678&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=85). So, baloney! Ponting is a sore loser and a hypocrite who is principled only when convenient. Waugh never stooped to such depths. I think the spirit of cricket was lost in translation between Waugh and Ponting.
Overall - the real difference between Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting is that Ponting wants to be all the great things Waugh was - tough, leader of men and a winner - without all those attributes of Waugh that make you squirm - the promoter of "mental disintegration". Unfortunately you can't get one without the other. I think Ricky Ponting is a great batsman and a fighter in his own right. I think he needs to find his own way of leading a clearly less talented team than Waugh - who inherited an incredible team from Mark Taylor (agree with freddy that he's the real leader)
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You nicely summed up the issue. I would add that this doesn’t exactly concenplate often. xD Anyway, good post…
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