There is something about the Ashes which seems to diminish the mental acuity of followers of the game. Some of the articles appearing in the wake of this Ashes series border on the bizarre.
Let’s focus on one of those topics that seems to have occupied the minds of all, the captaincy of Ricky Ponting.
There is a view that he is not a very good captain. But it seems to me that people only see what they are prepared to or would like to see. As such, I will ignore the subjective observations of the armchair pundits, my observations included, and look at a single objective measure used to describe a captain’s performance. By way of comparison, I will also examine the statistics of other great batsmen captains in cross section and longitudinally.
Cross-sectional analysis involves observation of various captains at the same or similar time. The difference between a cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis is that a longitudinal study involves a comparison of a number of captains over a period of time.
Compared with the two other batting greats of his time, it would be an understatement to say that Ponting compares more than favourably. I’m looking at Tendulkar and Lara: two batting captain greats with similar legend status. As a captain, Tendulkar won just 4 matches and lost 9. Lara won 10 and lost 26. By contrast Ponting, to date, has won a massive 39 Test matches losing just 11.
Looking at longitudinal statistics, we can see that recent past Australian captains have performed at the following rates: Border won 32 matches and lost 22. Taylor won 26, lost 13. Waugh 41/9.
As we can see, only Waugh comes close to matching Ponting’s record. Arguably, he has an advantage in that he had the likes of McGrath and Warne for the duration of his captaincy and when they were at their peak. Eight of Ponting’s eleven losses have come post McGrath and Warne. Also, consider that Waugh won the toss 31 times to Pontings 26. Both distinct advantages.
Incidentally, neither Border, Taylor nor Waugh ever managed to win an Ashes series 5-0 as Ponting did.
For a complete analysis, let’s turn our attention to one day cricket. Tendulkar as a captain has won 23 and lost 42 ODI’s, Lara 59/59. Now look at Ponting’s record of 134 wins to 39 losses. Ponting, over some 184 ODI’s has won 72.83% of matches. In the history of the game only Clive Lloyd has had greater success and he captained less than half the matches of Ponting.
Longitudinally, the stats are also enlightening: Border 107 wins and had 67 losses, Taylor won 36 and lost 30 and Waugh 67/35.
So Ponting outperforms Border, Waugh, Taylor, Lara and Tendulkar in both forms of the game, in all but one case.
One final area should be examined, the World Cup. Here, where the pressure counts, Ponting blows every other captain in the history of the game away. He has captained 22 matches and won 22 matches. That’s not a single loss and guess what? Not a single one of those matches was played in Australia and Ponting won less than 41% of the tosses!
Perspective is an interesting concept and everyone is entitled to their opinion. It would however be nice if some of those opinions had a little more grounding in reality.
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