Ponting building a new era in Australian cricket

Australian cricket coach Tim Nielsen has lauded skipper Ricky Ponting for maintaining such a high standard with the bat in a period of adversity and high player turnover.

While there will always be those who regard Ponting as the skipper who gave up the Ashes twice on English soil, Nielsen said the development of a new team in the aftermath of the Shane Warne/Glenn McGrath/Adam Gilchrist era was well underway.

“That has been going on for a while, we have had quite a bit of turnover,” he said.

“… I don’t know how many players we have had play since the end of the 2007 World Cup (38).

“We have not only had a big turnover but an influx of new talent. It is definitely part of the Ponting legacy.

“One thing I don’t think we should forget is how well he played in this period that we have had such success.

“The team has relied on him, they stood up and won the Champions Trophy and in my mind he just keeps getting better every day.”

Nielsen said the young Australian side had grown in resilience over the past 12-18 months.

“We have had some difficult times through injury. We have had to stick to our guns and try and get players that we figured were good enough into the squad so they can contribute consistently,” he said.

“It is a massive step playing at this level to anything else. It is very rare that players just walk in and have a day to day impact of winning games for their country right from the start.

“We lost two or three players, (Matthew) Hayden, (Brett) Lee being hurt and (Stuart) Clark who had such an impact for us.

“We never expected the likes of (Peter) Siddle, (Mitchell) Johnson and Marcus North to come in and just do it.”

The resilience to recover from mortifying defeats to South Africa in Perth and Melbourne, then the further trauma of an Ashes loss, was significant, Nielsen said.

“The most pleasing thing is when we have had the lows we have fought to come back and not let it be a consistently low time,” he said.

“The Ashes series was one where we were in the hunt the whole way through and a terrible session on the third day and ended up losing the series.

“We lost the Melbourne Test (v the Proteas) and were seven down and 210 behind and Binga (Lee) got hurt and all of a sudden they were in front.

“All those little things tip the balance of those games, that have been such close tussles in the opposition’s favour and we haven’t been able to fight out of those games which has cost us but that is international cricket.

“I think that is why we have seen the players keep developing as they have tasted the lows and kept developing and that has given them the steel to say ‘I would much prefer to be winning than losing, I understand now what it takes day in day out to win’.”

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