- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Ricky, Ricky, Ricky. You’re not making this easy for yourself. No-one begrudges your right to live and die by the selectors’ sword, as you declared you would when you stood down as captain last year.
As a competitive professional sportsman, I understand that’s how you’ve always operated.
Your hundred in Sydney and follow-up double in Adelaide last year showed us that you still have a lot to offer at Test level, and with very little pressure coming from the state ranks, it seemed as though you’d put your destiny back in your own hands.
Even your early form for Tasmania this season looked like your touch was still there.
The unbeaten 162 in Melbourne against two-thirds of the Test attack was exactly the sort of innings you needed, and we needed to see, and it was pleasing to see that your ultimate sign of ‘hitting them pretty well’ – the pull shot in front of square leg – was again on show.
Though I had written in comments and tweets that you probably should be considered a series-to-series proposition, given your age and being in the twilight of your career, I had no reason to think you wouldn’t contribute well in this series against the best team in the world.
But Ricky. Oh, but Ricky…
Four runs from two digs so far this series does not help the cause of a series-by-series proposition. Nor do facing only eight balls so far. And your two dismissals weren’t exactly freak accidents.
In Brisbane, you went a bit hard a bit early, as you’ve been wont to do throughout your career, and played inside the line of a Morne Morkel ball, slightly back of a length, nicking it through to Jacques Kallis in the cordon.
If there’s a classic Ricky Ponting dismissal, this would be it.
You were a little bit caught on the crease, but it was your hands, and the playing inside the line that brought you undone.
Yesterday in Adelaide was just U-G-L-Y, though, and as the stupid song goes, “you ain’t got no alibi.”
Let’s break it down a bit.
On spotting the line of the Kallis delivery, your back foot looks to move from your guard on middle or middle-and-leg slightly toward backward square. Not anywhere near as Phil Hughes’ used to, but it’s heading backwards nonetheless.
Your front foot comes forward slightly, but stops on or about the crease as if there’s some kind of barrier stopping any further forward movement to what you’ve seen is now a fuller delivery. By now, you already look like you should be further forward than you are, and you already look in trouble, you really do.
Admittedly, yorkers are difficult balls to get fully forward to at the best of times, but you haven’t gone anywhere really; you’ve just shuffled your front foot from facing point, to sort of, kind of facing cover. You’ve basically moved your foot 45 degrees and have stayed anchored to the crease.
From there, to a ball now swinging away from you in the air, you’ve not just played inside the line a shade; you’ve fully played a stump-width inside the line the delivery started on. By the time it gets past you and clips the top of off stump, it was as if you were on the wrong side of a divided highway.
And that’s without even mentioning what happened after that. If Michael Clarke’s twin lofted drives off Dale Steyn in Brisbane is an early entrant into the images of the summer, then the sight of you on all fours with three bail-less stumps standing behind you will be similarly unforgettable.
But I can forgive the falling over. It’s the being stuck on the crease, and the playing down the wrong line that’s going to be hard to defend. They’re signs of technical issues creeping back into your game when you can least afford it.
You’re about to have a 38th birthday, and you’re part of a No.3 and No.4 pairing that’s yet to fire a shot in the series while your colleagues have piled on more than a thousand runs around you.
No-one can question your career to date, and your record stands right up there with Bradman’s among the very best of Australian batsmen, but you need to turn things around quick smart.
I can’t help but think that your only saviours for this summer now can be a side that remains unbeaten against the world’s best, a continued lack of pressure from the Shield ranks below, or quality knocks on the weekend in Adelaide and/or another next weekend in Perth.
Your dream of one last Ashes tour almost has to depend on one or probably all of those happening.